octopus tentacles. fish eyelashes. ABORTION.

Almanac:

Arabella street market,

the crosswalk of 5th and Lex,

that seedy dive bar in the Village 

that he was ten drinks too far to remember-

all the intersections where they intersected

for an infinite golden second.

He always recognized her by her wisps 

of pink hair floating around her

like a cartoon character in a 

different world where she wasn't always

carrying a battered messenger bag 

and empty milk cartons.

He wanted their first kiss to be

on the top of the Empire State,

inhaling the lights of the city,

but she wasn't a romantic

so they settled for drinking in the smells

of jumbo sodas overflowing with diabetes,

screaming children

and tittering cartoon characters

trapped inside their arcade game worlds.

She cut her hair in the fall, 

pruning the cherry blossoms 

from their umber branches.

The bite of the wind and the golden crunch

of the leaves heralding only one thing:

Fall- the season to fall in love or fall apart.

Her tendrils of hair

strangled his shower, invading his pillows,

and the odd sweater.

Her lumpy pumpkin-spice latte sweater shed as much 

as the cat she rescued from a storm drain, 

but it didn’t last the week without its mother.

His cat costume that Halloween 

reduced her to tears

of laughter, but his bathroom rendezvous

with her old college roommate

reduced her to tears, and 

choleric stormclouds hovering

around the apartment before one 

day she was just gone

without a note, like the poor cat-

the stray umber strands 

lonely on his pillows 

the only kiss goodbye.

It was a lonely winter.

Breakups are like wintry New York mornings

waking up alone beneath twisted sheets, 

sliding feet first to face

the cruel ice of the floor and the day.

Springtime in the city is 

no better with its

cherry blossom showers,

and false promises of beginnings.

The girl he met at the coffee shop 

who spent their whole date with her phone

floating between her face 

and her pumpkin spice latte 

never called him back, 

and neither did the art student

who dragged him all the way

to Queens to see an

installation of milk cartons.

And while the greening of

the trees deadpanned a repose

he felt dead inside, dead as 

the cat wrapped in one of his sweaters

and laid to rest in a messenger bag 

floated down the Hudson.

He slid into bad habits of smoking

at seedy bars and at the infinite oblivion

of crosswalk lights at four in the morning

because torturous insomnia was 

better than waking up alone.

In the golden days of summer

he recalled an old college book

saying that with the sunshine and the

great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,

like a fast movie or a tape rewinding,

life began over again with the summer.

But he wouldn't know that because

as he twisted through the smells 

of a Chinatown street market,

ten drinks too far to remember that  

the wisps of pink he thought he was chasing 

had withered a long time ago, 

lights blinded him and brakes screamed.

In the final infinite haze of 

choler and foreign tittering,

he laughed at how romantic it was

that the repose of stormclouds

promised to wash away 

the loneliness of the world.