Copia by Erika Meitner Page B

and stumbling. Afterwards, he stands in the rented doorframe listening to her shifting, her breath. In the half-melting drifts. In the creak of the car door before the slam. And how she breathes, like an accordion or a jewel box, and the sky opens. It’s not the first time he prays for wonders instead of happiness. Cave of the Winds. Maid of the Mist. Rushing torrents of neon bouncing off the pavement between gaps in the motel curtains: aperture of plastic, chrome, electric light. Love is thrown and it is caught. It lives a long time in the air, floats on the surface of the skin. It can overflow, bounce like a fiddle string. It can be blurred, shaped like an onion peel. The half-moon of her body in this stained place, vertiginous. He hasn’t written these words in a long time. He writes them withthe motel pen.
If there was an apartment and I had a decent job and you felt happy and thought there could be a nice history together, would you come home?

P AST -F UTURE /F UTURE -P AST

    I tried to write you tonight
    but there was nothing to say

    If you already know the highway,
    semis bearing down on asphalt

    If you already know someone
    who moans in their sleep

    If you already know about crickets
    or the wires of night stretching

    like a fitted sheet, like a pencil compass
    rounding the lines of the moon

    and her consorts and are you in bed
    with a counterpart and if so

    then I am sure I already wrote you
    about the train, its muffled whistle-

    call insomnia, or the boxwoods,
    twenty feet tall, reeking of decadence

    and pilfered tradition
    There’s a phone booth here still

    older than I am and I
    was old enough to be used once,

    and once, too, my stories
    were not repeated, did not

    repeat themselves in the phone booth
    or to you when most nouns of this place

    were unique and strange on my
    tongue: farm, gravel, hay,

    and scrap and dirt and
    something singing

T ERRA N ULLIUS

    When we were done, all the buses had stopped running.
    When we were done, the moon was painted large and
    low-slung on the horizon. We sat like that a long time,
    listening to each other exhale blue plumes of smoke
    which tucked themselves through checkered screens.
    It was near-morning and we were in our underwear.
    It was near-dark and we were in our underwear,
    my legs draped across his lap. Gentle curvature
    of smoke—our bodies were looted, were broke.
    Outside, invisible wires held up water towers and
    busted street lamps. The sides of semis turned
    the highway to gold threads. We had hallelujah
    billboards. We had industrial rust. He put his finger
    to my lips and I became the wreckage so we could find
    our way back. We sat like that a long time.

A POLOGETICS

    A host of angels or a compass of cherubim
    or maybe a resolution of sprites has absconded
    with me or my common sense or possibly just
    my best self and godknowswhatelse.

    Which is to say I’m sorry.

    I didn’t mean to go to IHOP and spend the entire time
    trying not to stare at the man in a reclining wheelchair
    covered with a coverlet, sucking on oxygen
    near the ladies’ room.

    I didn’t mean to write you a letter that falls into
    the oversharing category or scare you with Horace
    or otherwise compromise what might have been
    a perfectly fine correspondence (if not for my mention

    of my copious tattoos or other youthful indiscretions).
    I didn’t mean to get a fever on this vacation, or yell at my son
    in the bathroom of the BP station because he was touching
    everything including the toilet seat. He always touches

    the toilet seat in every bathroom. This is not new.
    I did mean to go (which is to say I purposefully went)
    to the aquarium and wondered how or why everyone else
    seemed perfectly content with battling the crowds to see

    otters or anemones. In the tank in The Pacific Reef exhibit
    there was someone in an anonymous black scuba suit
    standing and waving under the water; he/she was attached
    to the window with a suction cup