Emily Alexander

Bigger Problems

The amount of hahas I sent Halle

was inordinate and unnecessary.

I hope she doesn’t stop adoring me.

I hope the sinkholes don’t pull the whole highway in

and the unassuming zoo just off the exit

I wandered through between the giant hands

of my parents when my hair was highlighter yellow

and I liked best the flamingos’

bent knees. To write good poems

Seth says one must do things.

I fill a glass jar with water.

I perform a little dance while putting on my pants.

I think of elbows and cheese shops and the frosted tips

of the Alps like a doily poking out from the city

where Janey is telling me

the exact temperature

of a large and precarious glacier.

In the city no one knows how loneliness

is the open untilled space

between houses, how far apart the houses are

in a town with no airport and an annual high school sports star

with dreams of unlikely grandeur.

Once my solitude was momentous

and resolute every time it snowed,

a feeling owed, like all optimistic misinterpretation,

to a pretty happy childhood, parents

who accrued quite a bit of debt

giving me everything I wanted more or less

and not knowing what tea bagging was until college.

These days I’ve got bigger problems. What being

for example a good person means. If it counts

just staring at the neighboring roof

collaged onto sky wondering

which configurations of doom await

me and everyone I can stand only in small doses

or if it’s something more lofty

like pulling the sea back from the long eroded shore

which I’ve tried and failed and failed

several times before.

Self-Portrait at 26

after David Berman

There’s a momentary hole

in the floor formed by shadow

and zoning out

here at C4 in SFO

I’m thinking of pistachio

ice cream and what

I read in this Vox piece

“the stifling reality

of human existence is that you

are perpetually yourself”

about Starbucks

of all things across

the corridor I watch a woman

sip coffee there in the silent

ventriloquy of distance

I’m 26 today

assuming strangers’ political

affiliations based

on luggage size and their varying

loudnesses stop

being so presumptuous I say

or my mother says

gallantly through me

I used to be kinder

I think and dumb

back before my feelings

became this tired cycle

of two or three unrealized

desires now I know

what really happened

in the Cold War and other

obscure swept under calamities

I read many books

and instantly forget the details

so I’m always mad at parties

but unable to say exactly why

I retain only sentimental

memories and feeling

home helmeted heading downhill

through the easy green

lull of mid-June Jade’s

octopus tattoo swimming

ahead our future some bright

imperative we’d grow right

into I’m hopeful I admit

the opposite hypothesis

I believe lately

is just a new version

of youthful misconception

one day I’ll think was so stupid

to believe when I’m well-dressed

and wedded with several bank accounts

all for specific purposes

I guess it’s true you’re less

likely to fall out of a plane

than encounter a moose

eating abandoned takeout

in the supermarket parking lot

which really happened

once in a wild western town I love

and am not headed for though

perhaps you’re closer

to a plane crash

than becoming a whole new

person with a more fashionable

lexicon and fewer hangovers

you are perpetually

yourself with a slight headache

and chapped lips

it’s not that I want another age

I’d just like to be better

at this one they’re calling my name

over the intercom

I got the numbers wrong

the gate’s closing

I’m not even close

I Walk One Way Then I Walk The Other

I could not become pliant even walking forever

under the unbearable trees trying to want less

or less impossible things. I hate the furious green

of these suburban yards, all the times I wished new cadences

of knees and nonsequiturs then turned

just a little older the city terrifying and normal.

All the lights of Manhattan go out like a crowd

I imagine leaving the stadium, and I’m in not New York

past the tiny factory near the single roundabout

the lengthening spaces between houses,

orchards fruitless hallways the dark wobbles through.

A house of mirrors for miles is my mind

or a slab of garrulous matter but the embarrassment

of my heart is my heart. I should be good

and funny and light by now, a gorgeous goddamn beacon

mixing martinis for everyone bathed in the good funny light

of inside a room. I turn back.

                                                You can never really get far enough

even here, mountains and no one for timezones,

not if you want like I do want to return.

And if the fat hens fenced in fields can enjoy

their dumb little artless lives surely it’s possible.

All I need is a rent-free coop and everything new

in the almost dark in the other direction.