maybe it’s
this city and there’s some law against
memories that aren’t your own, memories
disallowed like those ghosts of
previous apartment lives just
too much too many too
overwhelming to have all that
space filled with past filled with echo lives (present
too crowded thick dense already) or maybe it’s
this city and there’s some law against
putting things on windowsills
in case they fall
in fact I know there is, and
we’re buried under scaffolding
that looks like undoing
looks like unbreaking
looks like sunlessness or maybe
not just the city but because
she knew at the windowsill
what waited below, knew
there would be just a lamppost, naked,
before any of the rest of us knew, before we knew her, before
no bouquet came from a world of strangers
a world of billboards a world of not her, she
knew there would be breaking. nice thing
about flowers is, when you see some
at the roadside you can love someone you never met
who knows what your bouquet, the one outside the Blue
Moon Cabaret that is still there even though the black blood
of skidding tires is years gone, even though
it isn’t raining any more,
feels like
(New York, 2014)
©Rachel Susser