I hanged myself

in the 8th grade
from the hand of an Irish girl
who preferred to call me Elvis.

I swung under the guise
of a lithe and mad pianist
who pounded out his fury
in a leather wall-covered room
in Wawel Castle.

I was my father’s only son.
He would call me Sterling, under the icy
stone of Saffire, a kid pulled to school on a dog sled
by his prize bitch of the same name. Sliding to school
we were – in the streets of Dickson City, drunken morning
in the nostalgic haze of Luksusowa, to his school,
his dead pack the ghost of a nation, his little Poland.

The day before, on a whim for gay cosmopolitanism,
my mother allowed one short haircut,
a gift for her little gay boy
whom she dared call Sara:

The girl with a short story in her mouth,
crumpling syllables in front of a classroom
who strained to call her loser
as the anonymous hero
bludgeons himself to death
in the name of love.

Swimming in New York

With the precision
and wary eyes
of an elderly bicycle commuter,
I crossed your path.

Passing a blond and bright-eyed
baby in a stroller on the corner,
an old man herself,
I careened my car around
the same corner, into the flat corridors
of your neighborhood.

Like the bridge of your nose,
every intersection hovers at the brink
of a perfectly undisclosed stop sign.

And stranger, with your leg crossed
over mine, in the layers of your bed –
like a boat ride, familiar
as the shale of my life, and freshwater elodea,
Carpathian mountains in my blood,
and the lower recesses of a Europe
foreign and close as the red lights
in your black hair.

I look like someone you’ve never met.
And when our eyes meet –
bicyclist to motorcyclist,
we attend to each other’s right of way
in a city where traffic becomes
organic, moving like this.

The way I feel on Monday

A northerner, a North American
chewing the news.
Hurricane Lili encroaches
the deceased floodplains
of Louisiana. The towns
are already submerged. The state
could vanish.

Salt water has eroded
those banks: This is
the vocabulary of natural disaster.
And me: cramming German,
Our words lay sideways
in our throats.

I rinse in the morning
with saline – the water is dense as a sponge,
like the levies, the lists –
I calculate windspeed.
I record the hours until more
war, enforced evacuations.
Vocabulary piles up.
My chair begins to sink into the sand.

Wetsuit Orange Strasbourg

When we’re in Strasbourg
une orange sur la table
the wetsuit of your Paris flea market –
fitted to the square chests
of our skins.

When we’re in Brooklyn
a poem on the table –
the brick and papaya,
fuzz of your brow,
soft cyborg in my hands –
turning over an afghan holed up
in the cocoon
of your downy hair.

Sleeping with you
is like swimming – coming up
for air, and back in again –
into the zippers that don’t unlock,
the pieces: our words and things,
etching water against stone.

Contact: Sara_Solack@yahoo.com