by Emily Dalton
because I also know
that when we go back down that ladder,
we’ll no longer be in our world,
up here
where it’s just you and me
and nothing else matters.”
Your words summon all of the history between us.
Tears reflect in our eyes as we stare at one another,
and I wish I could wrap my arms around you
and press my face under your jaw,
where I know it fits so perfectly.
I hug you, and you hold me tight.
“You know I feel the same way, Max.”
Your shoulders bounce lightly as you weep.
When we let go, you shake your arms out
like you’re shaking off the emotions.
Then you head for the ladder.
I sit motionless for another moment
before following you across the roof.
Standing on the top rungs of the ladder,
you turn around—
not so much to face me
as to begin your descent—
but our eyes meet
for one more aching moment.
Then you drop your gaze
and disappear.
SUNFLOWERS
When you return to New York in the fall,
I’ve broken up
with Kevin.
Who was I kidding?
It was never over between us.
And now we’ve found our way back to each other.
We take turns feeling spiteful
and jealous or hopelessly in love.
One night in the first week of December
you come over with a bouquet of sunflowers,
and the thick, scratchy stalks bristle in my hands
as I stick them in a jar of water.
Indelicate as they are,
you’ve never given me flowers before.
It’s a sweet, pleasant surprise,
yet here we are, still—
almost five years later—
chasing after the ghost
of an apocalyptic horse,
trying to bring it back to life
just so we can continue beating it to death.
As I place the sunflowers on the windowsill,
a few of the garish heads smile up at me
in blameless delight.
The rest hang heavy.
AFTER NEW YEAR’S
I sit in my bed in Gowanus
with tears streaming down my cheeks,
leaving dark splotches on my sweatshirt
as I read the email you’ve sent me.
After every “I love you,” there is a “but.”
You don’t want it to be possible
for a guy to make you as happy as I do.
You never want to lose touch
with me or not know about my life.
And if we don’t end up together,
you are always going to imagine
what your life would have been like with me.
And you know it would be amazing,
and you know I would make you happy.
After reading your note,
a hundred clichés about broken hearts hang
from my neck like sandbags.
I call in sick to work.
I go in to work stoned.
I have no motivation
to wake up in the morning,
get dressed, eat food.
You have a permanent hold on my heart . . .
like a giant red metronome ticking off the beat.
In a fit of tears, I grab the wilting sunflowers
from their jar and throw them out the window
into the dumpster on the sidewalk.
The next morning, I perch on the sill to smoke
and glance down to find, on the fire escape below mine,
the sunflowers I tossed the night before
slumped over the edge, just out of reach.
All through the winter, I watch
as the rotting blooms
shrivel and freeze.
ON A BENCH ON THE WEST SIDE
There’s a big, dumb inflatable dolphin
bobbing over the pink baby waves
of the Hudson. I keep staring at it
while you protest my idea
to cut all communication for a while.
It’s hard to focus on a single thought,
so instead my mind starts playing out
my hypothetical escape:
I jump into the water,
mount the dolphin,
and sail off majestically
toward the horizon . . .
As the sun goes down in front of us,
the sky constantly evolving
and changing colors in this
picture-perfect breakup ambiance,
you agree to give me space,
just the six weeks I’ve asked for.
We hug goodbye, and now
I’m lingering here for hours.
It’s so beautiful—
the changing sky
and its filmlike reflection in the water—
that I can’t turn away.
So I stay even after
all has gone dark
and the watery pictures have stilled
and vanished.
I stay because
I need to be sure
it isn’t going to get pretty again.
REACHING
I’ve waited until late April
to finally contact you.
I call you, but your phone
goes to voicemail.
So I wait another few days and try again.
Still, no response.
I try to reassure myself that
no matter what is going on,
I can handle it, but
I can’t shake the feeling
that something terrible has happened
during our break from each other.
Finally, you text me to say you’re sorry
for missing my calls and that
you’re fine, just busy.
Your response seems oddly formal and robotic . . .
I can’t restrain myself. Instead of texting back,
I call.
After a few rings,
you answer, and
your voice sounds generic,
like it could be any male voice
in the world.
“Hi.”
I try not to sound indignant.
“Is everything okay with you?
Oh . . . I mean, if you’re busy right now,
that’s fine; I just—
Yeah, I’m all right . . .
I’m sorry, but why does this feel
so weird right now, Max?”
“I’m not sure if you already knew this
or not,
but
I’m kind of dating someone.”
And just like that,
we
aren’t
“we”
anymore.
And you
are just
another “him.”
REFLECTIONS: CHILDHOOD NIGHTMARE
I couldn’t have been any older
than five or six:
It’s my dad and me,
and we’re standing outside
some sort of military base
in the middle of the desert.
And there’s warfare going on all around us,
bombs dropping and guns and fighting.
I look up to my dad,
and he’s dressed in an army uniform . . .
and I’m pulling on his arm,
trying to get him to look down at me.
I’m saying, “Dad! Dad, come on!
We have to get out of here!”
He looks down at me,
but he doesn’t know who I am.
He doesn’t know I’m his daughter,
and he brushes me away.
Eventually,
I realize that
it’s time to wake up.
MAX’S NEW BOYFRIEND
“I love your hair! Is that natural?”
Up until now, I’ve only ever seen
a few photos of Shane on social media,
and in all of them he has a big,
eye-crinkling grin on his face.
Standing in front of me
in the kitchen of Sophie and Ramona’s apartment,
complimenting my curls,
Shane is a real human, lifelike and animated,
and I’m oddly thrown off
by how similar he and Max look,
almost like they could be brothers.
Same height, same soft, round features,
same short hairstyle and scruff.
The only major differences are hair and eye color;
Shane’s dark brown hair and eyes contrast
next to Max’s blond and blue.
Max mixes drinks for himself and Shane
as the three of us stand near the fridge
talking about my hair.
“I hated it all through high school and college.
It was always just this big nest of knots.
I had no idea how to handle it,
so I’d just straighten it every day.”
My brain goes into some kind of autopilot survival mode.
I avoid eye contact with Max.
“Anyway, it was pretty exhausting,” I continue,
“trying to make it straight all those years.
Some things you just can’t force straight,
am I right?”
I excuse myself abruptly and hurry away,
flinging myself into the bathroom.
Staring into the mirror over the sink,
I smile at my reflection,
then burst into a drunken fit of giggles,
and it feels oddly thrilling
to have a moment like this
alone with myself.
I down the rest of my whiskey ginger
and then rejoin the party,
steering clear of Max and Shane.
As the night goes on and everyone gets drunker,
I inevitably bump into the two of them again
on the fire escape.
With more liquor in our systems,
we talk cheerfully and laugh,
and as I get to know Shane better,
I slowly begin to grapple
with a disconcerting truth—
I like him.
I can see how he’s a suitable match for Max.
They have the same taste in music,
they dress similarly, they seem
to have a calm, drama-free way
of communicating with each other,
and Shane also dated girls in high school
and didn’t fully come out until college.
“He also likes to write, just like you, Em!” Max says.
“He’s written and directed a few plays.
I’ve read them; they’re really good.
You would like them.”
REFLECTIONS: FIFTH BOYFRIEND
Berlin.
The beginning of November.
Semester abroad.
I lean against the railing
of Max’s balcony
with my eyes closed,
letting the late-morning sun caress me
instead of cuddling in close to him.
He kisses my jaw and
wraps his arm around me.
“Your poor fingers,” he says.
Max knows all about my terrible habit
of picking at the skin around my cuticles.
I like to peel it back slowly
and then watch
as a thin strip of fresh blood
oozes
from the raw underlayer of skin.
Those close to me can gauge my stress level
by the number of bandages I have
wrapped around the tips of my fingers.
Max coos into my ear as he kisses each finger
and then holds my hand, and I can feel butterflies
shaking out their dampened wings inside my stomach.
He’s so good at holding me accountable,
knocking my hands apart,
begging me to stop mutilating my skin.
As the sunlight dims behind a low-hanging cloud,
he brings my face close to his and asks,
“Dear fräulein, why do you do this to yourself?”
as if he doesn’t already know.
POETRY IN MOTION
It’s well past midnight when I leave the party
at Sophie and Ramona’s—
leave Max and Shane—
and step onto an empty subway car
at the 2nd Avenue F station.
No one gets on at Delancey/Essex.
No one at East Broadway.
I’m drunk and alone when one of those
“Poetry in Motion” placards catches my eye
in the corner of the car—
“A Strange Beautiful Woman”
by Marilyn Nelson
—eight short lines
about meeting a strange
beautiful woman
in the mirror.
Hey,
the speaker and her reflection
both ask,
What you doing here?
I stand in front of the placard,
reading the poem
over and over again
until I enter a sort of trance.
The music in my headphones is on shuffle,
and that song “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem
comes on. Slowly, I close my eyes
and let the beat move me.
DECISIONS
In the morning, slices of white sunlight
sneak between the blinds,
and outside, someone lays on their horn,
producing a sound like the dramatic fermata
at the end of a song.
I know that last night
I unearthed a fear I’d
buried deep
five years ago
in a stairwell in Milliken:
my fear of falling in love
and losing it all.
And now,
having fallen and lost,
I have to decide what to do—who to be—
in response.
Max and I will never be
Max and Emily
again.
But can Emily be Emily again?
The honking quiets.
I stare
at the cross sections of light
glowing in the far corner
of the ceiling and begin
to coax myself
up.
ACCOUNTABILITY
I quit my job and leave the city.
I go back to rural northern Connecticut
where I grew up,
where the night sky is impossibly dark
and the roads are so empty and silent.
I�
��ve stopped smoking, so the nights
in particular have become
long-lost sober reminders
of an entirely separate existence.
I miss the comforting glow and buzz of the city,
but I’m coming to appreciate the bright stars
I had forgotten existed,
and the distant hoot of an owl
interrupting the soft hum of crickets,
and the sound of the trees inhaling
and exhaling a sudden gust of wind.
I’m learning how to chop firewood with my dad;
I go on long walks through the woods with my mom;
I smash rocks apart on the driveway with my niece and nephew.
My dreams are shockingly elaborate and vivid,
like the constellations I’m rediscovering.
Sometimes, I dream about Max,
and other times, I dream about drugs.
But for the most part, I keep having this dream
about rising high in the air above everything
and floating over it all to where I need to go.
In these dreams, it takes concerted focus
for me to rise up.
The moment I lose concentration,
gravity pulls my body closer and closer to the ground.
I’m like Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins,
or Charlie and Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
or Wendy and the kids in Peter Pan.
Only, instead of laughter or burps or fairy dust,
I seem to be relying on
my own resolve.
FORGING
A family friend—a blacksmith—
needs help in his shop,
and I need a job,
so every morning for the next few months,
I don heavy Carhartts and steel-toed boots
and drive to town.
I learn how to weld metals together
and heat iron in the forge;
how to work the massive power hammers
and the drill press and the loud, groaning band saw;
how to spark, light, and adjust the butane valve on the blowtorch;
how to grind and sharpen the blade on a knife;
and how to read the color and the grain of the metal
for thickness and density and strength.
And in the evenings, I write.
It’s not cold enough yet for a fire,
but I build one in the living room fireplace anyway.
The sound and movement of the flames,
like tiny, pale flags whipping in an invisible wind,
make me feel less alone with my words.
My fingers swollen from work,
I type at my desk
with little aim
but to make something
anything