Six Months in Suburbia: Poems
(Constellation #1)
I grew up in the suburbs of South Jersey, just across the bridge from Philadelphia. It wasn’t until I left my home that really I understood what a strange and insulated world suburbia could be. The suburbs are suffocating, but so safe, miserable, but easy as instant lemonade. They shield you from all the scariest things before spitting you out unprepared into a wider, wilder world. Going back can be both comforting and mind numbing.
Six months in suburbia can feel like an eternity, or end in a flash, sudden as a storm.
It just depends on the season.
At The Intersection
You pulled into town four minutes ago
and didn’t notice for a while
because the houses all look the same here,
and the night falls on everything,
same as it always has.
The air smells like
a long time ago,
still, or maybe even longer,
now, than last time.
The moon sighs lopsided in the indigo sky,
waning or waxing out your windshield.
You can’t remember which, right now,
you just know everything is strange,
right now, and it must have something
to do with the shape of her.
And you can’t even see if there are stars out,
because you are idled at this intersection
and the stoplight has spat
red, filmy light over everything
in it’s four corner radius.
And nobody even lives in this neighborhood, tonight,
and you think long about running the light,
but minutes pass and you just sit,
foot on the break,
waiting for the green,
because that’s what you’re supposed to do,
the same as you always have.
Silence
It sounds like this —
a freight train moaning,
miles away,
crickets,
radiator fuzz,
automatic garage doors,
and not a single passing car,
not one.
Summer
Summer settles sticky and sweet
over suburbia.
Boys ride by on bicycles,
racing the sun to town line.
The willows hang low,
wet from heat.
We are the only ones
who know about these streets;
people don’t draw maps
of places like these.
Small-time kids at window sills
dream their big-time dreams.
and you
are
here,
like you’ve always been.
Hum
There is a hum.
Mom’s downstairs vacuuming
over sunspots in the carpet.
Your bedroom windows thrown
wide open to wide world.
Sky sighs through the screen,
sun falls like a feather.
There is a hum:
Dad mowing the lawn,
a door sliding back and forth.
The children down the road,
who knock each other over,
and howl with the
crickets and cicadas in the trees.
One car goes by,
the first one in a while,
another house’s phone rings.
Hello?
There is a hum.
The 4th of July
You want to eat the Fourth of July fireworks,
to pick the sparks from the sky like summer berries.
You want to catch the falling embers,
glowing midnight Monarchs,
on your tongue.
You want to taste what the sky tastes
when it is lit on fire like that.
You want to know what it is
to have all eyes on you,
to feel the shapes of other people’s
ooh’s and aah’s in your mouth.
You want to swallow the booms
and feel the echoes rattle off of your ribcage.
You want to burst open,
to be electrified,
because this place is just miles of ground
curled in on itself,
and you belong in the sky.
Kicking Cars
Suburban revelations are made,
sitting on the overpass
at a purple time of day;
dawn or dusk or twilight,
kicking at the cars
the come up on the interstate.
No one takes the exit for town,
or even slows down
to take a look.
You used to come here all the time.
Sitting on the northbound side,
you’d imagine the collision
of your boot against their fenders
gave the traffic its momentum.
Kicking cars all evening long
late as you were allowed to.
You didn’t think that anyone
could make it by without you.
Bar
There is one bar in town.
It doesn’t have a name.
And it doesn’t need a name;
the locals know it by it’s frame.
You go there sometimes,
with your friends,
but it’s never once been fun.
By the quiet of night
you’re drunk and decided —
If this old bar’s real name’s beneath her,
then, one day you wont need a name either.
Couches on Curbs
There is a couch on the curb.
There is always a couch on the curb.
Today it’s on Peach St, in front of
the Pasternack’s place.
At midnight some boys from the baseball team
leave their houses through second-floor windows
to meet up at the couch on the curb.
They each take a corner and drag the couch
down Peach St.
and four more blocks,
through the park,
and into the Almonesson woods.
They push it down along the stream
and line it up next to three more couches,
an abandoned canoe,
two yield signs covered in sharpie and spray paint,
and a 1970’s La-Z-Boy.
Then they flop onto the couches
and stare at the tree branch fractals of the sky,
and the things they think up there
might change it all someday.
Maybe Death should be Loud
It must be true that people die in this town,
but who?
And when?
And why isn’t it in the newspapers?
(It is we just don’t read them.)
And why isn’t it on every news station
all over the world?
(someone has died)
It’s the biggest thing there is,
and the quietest, sometimes.
The Cold
I leave my jacket open for the walk.
The houses go by in a straight, white line.
Wind in the wash on the walkway,
wind in the whites of my eyes.
If my bones are numb,
maybe they aren’t there at all.
I do wish, sometimes,
I were just made
of space for something better
instead of mass and edges.
I do wish, sometimes,
I were frozen in my footsteps.
Maybe then I’d be made of history and ice
instead of cumbersome motion and life.
Telling Time
Did you know that the hours are not real?
And time is just one big, long forever.
And we can’t escape this game
inside a game,
inside the largest thing there’s ever been.
And no one knows the answer,
and no one knows how to find it.
People search in the feelings they get
when they aren’t on the ground,
and they die doing it,
and don’t come back.
Some don’t have the time
to even look;
they have always been
the thimble on the board
of streets they can’t afford
to live on —
there is always a pistol.
And some people pray
for answers,
and some people live
like ghosts,
and some people just look down at their wrists
and tell the time.
Six Months in Suburbia
You’ve been all over these past few years —
You’ve been to carnivals and churches,
seen 8-story nightclubs,
and had dreams under fever.
You’ve seen dystopia in real life,
you’ve seen the never, never future.
You’ve been to the end of everything
and peeked over the craggy edge of it,
and saw every color all at once,
and it was such euphoria,
but you’ve still seen nothing quite as strange
as six months in suburbia.
Thanks for Reading!
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