6

Somewhere between the fourth shot of Jager
and a beer, everything disappears
down the hole of a yellow straw. One day,
barriers will fall like Berlin in the 80s and
I'll understand day drinking. How sitting
at 4 pm sipping means productivity.

While watching ice clink, you complain
about unripe blueberries, the cold
and a remnant of a summer yet to come.
My eyes squint tighter. The woman
with the tray says numbers I want to read,
repeats herself again and again. Almost angry.

But who's angry here? The woman or me,
the one unable to pull a series of letters,
jumbled together like monkeys in a barrel.
Somehow, I think when I pull away
from the bar at the end of the night,
day drinking is the least of my problems.

5

Yesterday, in a garden with a duck castle,
I sat and watched couples soak vitamin d
and each other. Like the mallard,

who chased his mate up and down
a stream, waddling through leaves after her,
taking flight only after peering over the weeds,

searching. To the left, a Turkish 20
something with a blonde, smiling with eyes,
stared into small talk. His jacket, slightly

unbuttoned. His hand, resting on her right
thigh. They laughed. To the right, a man
grabs the bottom of a white dress, says

something I'm too far away to hear, falling
into a forever locked in a moment on a bridge.
I'm a voyeur. These scenes bite my eyes,

remind me I'm just close enough to grab,
but not quite have. Sure, snapshot and let it
flutter into oblivion. We're just Pedal boats

on a stream, sticking briefly on a branch.
We're sucking up too much water,
overflowing with language.

4

I was named by the Mexican janitor.
The way my mother tells the story,
after she squeezed me out, about
the time the hall lights flicker once,
and a doctor settles in until the morning,
they wrapped me in a blue blanket,
stuffed me into her arms. She stared down,
full of adoration and new mother claim.

But somewhere, the need for identity
bubbled inside her like a bottle of mineral
water. She inhaled my baby powder
and poops, muttered three different identities
after I love you, testing the sound
on her tongue. Then, he walked in. He wasn't
my father, no, but the man with the mop.

He wiped his hands on a pair of grubby
khakis, smiled a four missing tooth grin,
a glimmer of pseudo gold on the incisor.  
Cute boy you got dere, she whispers now,
reciting in his accent. What his name?
She looks down, unsure. How do we know
the name is right? Who tells us it's okay
and that we'll love it later?

There's an inherent pressure of the future,
no, gravity. Some people find comfort in liquor,
others in the line on a mirror. Me?
That tiny finger pressed against the window
behind the park, face covered in some semblance
of chocolate, full ignorance to the world,
beckoning a language I don't know. But,
that understanding of the trees, the breath
of another, the dispersing gravel between bike
treads-- it's all the same, really.

3

Uno's an aggressive game
when playing with a Russian,
four Americans, and a Honduran
named Raul. When we slap
green 6's, yellow skips and red +2's,
everyone's a Zicke.

To my left, a plus four color change
offers green and fick dich. Someone
whispers Uno and everyone groans.
This is a family game, somewhere--
where Uncle Jim slips candy under
the table and Dad tsks your sister
when he's skipped. But not here.

Here, we drink Jever and take too
big bites of a doner kebab, cabbage
falls on the plate, mixes briefly
with lamb shavings. I pluck a piece
and pop it in my mouth before playing
a blue 4. It tastes like Italy and nostalgia.

Or the alley outside our apartment,
where you used to call for keys
or homework assignments, while old men
with canes tapped at the cobble stones,
shaking their heads. I'd duck behind
the windowsill, giggling to myself.
When a pigeon pops up and stares at me,
I scream, and back here, when you play
that final card, I hear a pigeon coo
and it's all the same everywhere, ja?

2

Yesterday morning, as I walked six bus stops with my iPod on loop,
a Chinese woman with pigtails I once twisted wore a pair of sweatpants,
graying and torn, with a beige thermal and vest, limp in the wind.
She was running--past the gas station and the intersection where
an American muscle car waited impatiently. A couple on bikes stopped
next to me, giggling to themselves for a moment, and I wished I was her.
Not afraid of the could be car peeling down her lane as she outstretched
like the plane I rode in on. It's the way the pigtails slapped the wind.
The almost childlike hair ties tucked at the ends, like the laugh that lingers
outside my window and clings to curtains. Something for the lovers, maybe.
For the ones suffering from fernweh, or those that stare at the church steeple
from the ninth floor as something sickens deep down, screams at you to run,
not from, but to the darkening skyline--a crimson only dead bodies know.

1

When the Captain turns off the fasten-seat-belt light
and opens the cabin to the low hum of darkness,
my stomach churns. When the guy next to me thrusts
the window with such force, that would-be-smooth
swishes become more like smacks, and I forget
what the pull looks like for a moment, my left eyebrow
twitches. It keeps on even after the woman behind me
states, in a voice so loud the man fourteen rows up turns
around to look, that she's a trapped rat. Even after
a turbaned baby cries into his mother's red and yellow sari
and she lets her older boys wash their hands
with the bathroom door open, giggling and splashing water
like they aren't still naked from the waist down.
Where is home in all of this? Is it when you struggle
not to lean against the elevator's insides, the cool biting
at the unexpected heat. Or when you wonder if you'll ever
decorate those prison like walls, if it's worth it.
After all, you didn't bring that many clothes,
so what's a poster worth anyway?

Germany Update

In an attempt to keep writing and push my skill even further, I'm going to try and write a couple of new posts a week while in Germany this summer. It'll be hard, and I'll probably be cramming them in one after another sometimes, but to whoever is still out there reading...thank you.