Sometimes you just need to hide in your room
and play all your old records backwards.
The dissonant note resolves to a mellow tone.
The wooden boy resolves to become a real one,
but the real boy, crushed by the training wheels of academia,
only wants to stand in a forest, his leaves dripping with early fog,
blue nightingales on his forearms.
The gardenias in Billie Holiday’s hair are no more.
People are improvising masks from their underwear.
The president is an obese virion.
It’s hard to play anything with these waterlogged drumsticks,
hard to see the forest for the smoldering.
Ellis Marsalis and Wallace Roney are no more.
Bra cups are the right shape, but try breathing through one.
Try resolving to become more woke
while some corporate behemoth breaks out the cigars
and ashes all over your bicycle.
The long arc of the moral universe is no more.
The snow-blurred night in Greenwich Village with my brother
where we listened to the pianist at Mezzrow
play brilliantly for almost no one is no more.
What will survive of us is moot.
If you make a mistake, repeat it; that’s what God did.
Sometimes you need to end where you began.
—Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio is the author, most recently, of Now We’re Getting Somewhere.
