Return to Magic

COHORT 4

The summer of empty telephone static left

my heart, open on the porch swing where blackbirds split 

walnuts like every hopeless poem I fought 

& lost. It was the summer of drivers licenses: hazy

ballads & passports to autumn, none of them mine—

the summer I discovered a walnut’s inky shells 

were no match for the shy fledglings encased inside.

On my neighborhood shore, I coughed up 

all the loves I could not bring myself to swallow. 

What I knew of love: a fruitless seed 

watered by the tears of the teak tree. 

How it always lodged itself in the wrong yard, 

planting saudades against memory’s windows. 

Before I tumbled into my new life, I carved open 

my entry wound as a childhood memory, 

cried until the emergency dispatch drowned out

all of July’s bloodless wrath. Doctors prescribed

pills, powders, pixie dust. Medicine to substitute for time.

Now, in September’s dying sizzle, I stir leftovers

of my faraway suburbia into Manhattan’s milky air.

In time, I’ll learn to call the metropolis home, 

learn its webbed gridlines & pulsing sirens.

Once upon a time, I wanted these sleepless city nights 

the way a child wants a fairytale to last forever. 

See: to believe in magic, I had to marry my dreams,

marry any prophecy of success beneath the city sky.

So when I visit The Land of Stories once more, 

there are no longer myths & mountains of light

but rather the magic they preserve. This is not goodbye, 

for as long as there are seasons to sit on the porch swing 

& cast spells in stories, like symphonies.