City of Small Admissions
Tell the tram driver you saw the streetlight take a vote.
He pauses mid-pocket with an old ticket and a cigarette,
lets the light do its quiet arithmetic: twelve seconds amber,
eight seconds reluctance; then it blinks at you like apology.
Tell the sanitation woman you buried your brother’s name
in a shoebox behind the laundromat.
She hums as she sorts cans, and sometimes hums
are prayers wearing work gloves. She calls the alleys
like someone reading a roster of absent gods.
Tell the nurse in Bay 3 the scanner keeps saying error.
She taps the machine like a barber tapping a comb until it obeys.
I tell her the scanner is honest; it reads us as tangle of debts.
She smiles, small, stores it in a drawer marked mercy.
Tell the refugee on the bench your father taught you to count
by birds on the wires. Numbers used to mean
who came home; now they mean which beds remain.
He teaches me his word for rain: three vowels, one bruise.
Tell the cop watering the sidewalk plants you once stole a flag
to wrap a radiator and keep a baby warm.
He laughs at patriotism used as insulation.
We watch the baby sleep like a country
that has forgotten its anthem.
Tell these small confessions into pockets of transit time:
trams, benches, meters; where the city keeps its secrets
in receipts and coins. The tram driver folds your words
and sells them to the timetable; the sanitation woman
bundles them neat; the nurse files them under temporary.
By dusk the city returns them, cheaper, softened
by curry, diesel, and mercy
that hands back a lost umbrella
before the rain begins.
Broca/Wernicke Love Song
BROCA: 04:12 - patient speaks in fragments, verbs missing.
WERNICKE: 04:12 - patient speaks in sentences made entirely of prepositions.
Broca: I used to be a verb factory.
Now I’m a locksmith with two wrong keys.
I pronounce resist and the room misunderstands:
windows open onto the wrong street.
Wernicke: You translate silence into a policy brief.
You dress a cough like a manifesto.
The parish of syntax is shuttered; we drink
the leftover grammar and call it sacrament.
- clinical note: speech returns when children sing.
- item removed: pamphlet deemed subversive.
Broca: I can still make the sound for matter,
but not the sound for why. Nouns wait in long lines;
adjectives pay fines.
Wernicke: You stitch a sentence; the seam reveals a flag.
They inventory verbs like contraband.
A knock sounds like law. We answer in nouns.
- intervention: replace slogans with a creek’s photograph.
- objection: pictures cannot quiet a remembering tongue.
Broca: Let me be the carpenter of small returns.
I’ll build an imperative from leftovers
and offer it to anyone behind a window:
“Name the city. Bend the verb. Hold the sky.”
Wernicke: We’ll teach the machine to mishear elegantly,
play the wrong chorus until the chorus sounds like home,
return censored places their echoes.
- addendum (glitch): freedom fits in two syllables, one hand.
- glossary: a silenced throat is a song held in escrow.
Instructions for Mourning
If you fold the shirts, fold them with the map inside.
Let whoever launders the life find directions
between the seams.
If you make coffee, grind the beans twice.
Talk to them like a ledger.
Stir until the spoon remembers
how your tongue once woke.
If you go to the river, carry stones with names.
Let the current take them
as if water could redraw grief’s geography.
If you answer the phone, pretend the line is a window.
Do not let the caller dictate the weather.
Weather is yours to fail with.
If you plant, plant something stubborn:
yucca, lilac, rumor.
Feed it scraps, unsent postcards,
spare coins meant for better days.
If you cry in public, cry like currency:
let it change hands.
Keep a clean towel for your palms.
If you write the name, write it again
until it is less a wound
and more a map: a route for the lost.
And if you must stop, stop at the sink
and count the plates.
Let them stack like liturgy.
Then fold a shirt and lay it down
like an answered letter.
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