Copia by Erika Meitner

C ORRESPONDENCE

    I drive around in my small, old Honda Civic
    and play music that reminds me of driving
    the same car when it was new but no larger.

    The Civic held four people, but now, with the car seat
    and its five-point safety harness, it holds three.
    There are Goldfish crackers ground into the floor mats.

    My husband is the bassist in a local bar band.
    They play classic rock covers, and though my husband
    hates classic rock, he loves his powder-blue bass.

    He loves playing in a band. He loves when Frank,
    the owner of the bar, gets drunk and tells the band
    how much he loves them. They have a monthly gig.

    He makes fifty dollars a night when he plays 622.
    There are things that are broken beyond repair,
    but my marriage isn’t one of them.

    I am not telling you any of this.
    Everything I am telling you is in that letter.
    I will not tell you about the fact that I thought

    praying mantises were an endangered species
    when I was a kid. That was in the seventies.
    If I think too much about my childhood,

    I will feel too old to write you a letter.
    The Internet tells me that this is a long-standing
    urban legend; killing a praying mantis was never

    illegal or subject to a fine. The origin of the myth
    is unknown. Mantises are beneficial to gardens they live in.
    Here it seems to make sense to evoke Eden,

    but I won’t. My son loves praying mantises.
    He goes outside each night after dinner to
look for guys
,
    and finds them tucked into the spiky barberry bushes.

    I will not write you about my son, and if I mention
    Eden, it would be to tell you that there’s no such thing.
    That you are not the talking snake and I am not

    the woman without clothes who offers and offers.
    The apple has no knowledge to give us. Our cosmogony
    is unclear. This is not a love note, or a prayer,

    or a field equation. I hold my cards close to the vest.
    You send me a picture of a tattoo you’d like to get
    of a compass, and the road unravels in front of my Civic

    like a spool of thread. We are a gravitational singularity,
    a theory that implicates epistemology, but I am not
    rigorous enough in my approach to uncover anything.

    You write me a letter.
    I write you a letter back.
    We go on like this for some time.

WITH/OUT

    after Janice N. Harrington

    And the mornings were detritus,
    bent bottle caps, chrome diner matchbooks,

    always the pack of playing cards in cellophane
    with the tab half-pulled, and the unearthed voice

    of the drive-thru pricked by shined key chains
    jangling like tire irons. And the nights were detritus,

    expired gas station receipts, mall vapors, a half-used
    tin of tattoo salve, all of Bayonne, New Jersey

    mapped on your back in chalk. The moon was detritus,
    shining on a pickup dodging the curb, trailing nail clippings,

    onion skins, translucent stars, five beat-down Nikes
    that wound up phone-pole hopping in Ditmas.

    And you were the detritus of magnifying glasses,
    half-done lanyards, award ribbons fluttering

    like condom wrappers at the shore, the wreckage
    of contour lines, a hand-tooled leather souvenir

    from a red rock abyss. The scent of your drawer
    was fresh rubber and guitar picks, the metallurgy

    of scattered loose change and blood. Your bed
    wore charcoal detritus, lip-gloss and pot-dust,

    ill-fitted sheets. And the detritus the July heat let loose:
    gnawed Bic pen caps, a glowing Duncan Hines yo-yo

    tangled in dead 9-volt connectors and envelopes
    whose lips sealed shut from humidity that swelled

    the windows into their frames. If you had scrawled
    something on the inside of my wrist back then

    it might have been a Venn diagram: your contented breath,
    six glove-box necessities, the muffled places detritus would take us.

S TAKING A C LAIM

    It seems a certain fear underlies everything.
    If I were to tell you something profound
    it would be useless, as every single thing I know
    is not timeless. I am particularly risk-averse.

    I choose someone else over me every