She appeared in the first January of my adult life.
By the second, I had cats to love and poems to email
from my desk at the Museum of Biblical Art (defunct).
By the seventeenth, I had everything. At first.
Now I am one week deep in to having less.
This is barely a poem. This is almost an experiment.
At work I tell everyone about her. Now they know:
I talk too much in staff meetings, I have greasy hair
and I have a dead cat. They don’t know
about poem-a-day. They don’t know about you.
Don’t worry, I’m looking for a new job. I won’t give in
and give them everything, I won’t give them you.
I don’t usually write like this. It feels ok.
I want someone else to hear the syncopation of my thought loops.
This, to me, is the goal
of it. Of this. Some of it. But the rhythm has changed.
You would think it would come together, click, boom,
the January of it all, the kitten saved from frigid
streets in Brooklyn, the wintriness of what we do here,
the beginnings of all the years, my fortieth birthday
and the death. It should make for an incandescent synthesis
of every line I ever wrote, re-birth of language that sets me
roaring into February. But thank god we all know better here.
Thank god, and maybe next year, we can figure out
who that is
even though the Museum of Biblical Art is now,
maybe rightfully,
defunct.