Campus(es)
Twenty years since we jigsawed
essentials in clear plastic drawers,
thinking ourselves intellectuals for
having reached college. I vaulted
my bed to make room, whacked my head
on the ceiling most mornings. Someone
procured our produce, health-insured us,
handled plumbing and, twice, a bat
pinballing the all-girls hall. (Tennis rackets).
SUNY outpost, conference, midlife:
I’d forgotten that cruel ruse of incomplete
freedom. It’s 5pm dinnertimes and
burlapped foam couches, cinderblock walls
siphoning serotonin. Home is our good Macy’s
mattress, dressers that haven’t housed someone’s
gym shoes or worse. The street preacher yowls
for Jesus. Back alley beer pong spans four
hours, flouting all expletives. The sidewalk’s
a hopscotch of dog shit.
I pine for New York so acutely
that even Penn Station might do.
Starved of oddity here, days wither
to pantomime. Senses collapse on
themselves, threaten to flat-line.
We play institutional dollhouse:
mother figure bleached white sheets
and hung signs re: fire safety, recycling,
paper-doll parents who for $125
replace a lost dorm key. No blessed irony,
no bad performance art. No kale and
no dissonance. The city has ruined me.
Everywhere’s somewhere to wait
while longing for home—home that is
strange and unkind, just how I like it.
When I embarked upon a fellowship in Children’s Book Writing, my assigned mentor requested a statement addressing what I hoped to gain from our work together. I responded in the form of this poem.
Dear Writing Mentor
Need help with structure.
I’ve said that to therapists over
the years, not about writing.
Still do—
need help, I mean, with roadmaps
for prose (sure, and adulting).
Not with syntax or diction: that’s where
I warrant some Rx to numb it.
Absent structure, words are
confessions. Send strikethroughs and mazes
of arrows. Hold compliments: I’ll know
when it’s good. Till then, scrawl stuff like
What’s happening here? Why in this order?
There’s something called PLOT. I’ll picture
cemeteries, which is the problem. I’m not
macabre, just undereat macros and overeat
puns. Not you—you’re methodical,
given to mapping. You deconstruct
work into quadrants, shift them around.
Come permute permutations and open
the lid to my brain. It sees structure
as word problem: pie in the sky
always anchored by IFs. Your Pi is
3.14; mine’s crowned with those crumbles
clustered like barnacles, fastened with
nebulous goo. Tired, you’ll tell me to
save them as fuel for the long road ahead.
Haiku: LIRR
@ ticket time
I owe you nothing.
You’re packed with posers and bros
and every seat’s gone.