LIZ COUNTRYMAN
100 OVERLOOK TERRACE
The treed street down from the apartment
building’s entrance overhung but cheap
isn’t exactly unfamiliar but seems
unfamiliar the way a body is your own
or someone else’s when your eyes cross
again and again I enter a tunnel
at the bottom of the block a canyon draining
the people gone it’s never as cool as
you’d like and no place to sit I think
I am a cotton ball like rubbing some
thing renders it numb-er or makes a person
residual nights it’s like nobody
even exists I look at the baby blue tile and
behind it glimmering rough neighborhoods
I view through my own wall in other
words marring them it seems too safe
here my own body its ravines its grace
isn’t urban enough there isn’t some
pathway to a clear pool only this tenuous aerial
aspect and nobody else around
35 CROSSBROOK ROAD
From many mistakes later those obstructions
rugs construction dirt overwarm
plane crossing up absolutely tiny and black
or our eventual departure take on
an overcast seasonless milked factory-made
despondency but when we actually did live there
there were bright entrances for instance
the pink sheet my father rolled the fall
leaves up into or some wet space
squeezed from moss after a quick
snow’s immediate sunned melt an oily
wonton dividing in my mouth I let
my tongue into each part of it a big map
proceeds under concerned fingers roads
relentlessly curving toward the furred edge of
the paper we continue on the flip
side almost beyond me to flatten my thinking or to
get a car rather than simply smell
it rumbling a mess of airless highways
breathes into these snake holes