And in New Jersey by Willa Granger She looked like a mid-morning saint, bloated t-shirt, teaching me of a perforated America, her Puritan witch muscles locked against the sky, my heart reinvented in learning how to vault mountains, that westward inclination, the bodily attraction dropping into my stomach and looking towards the sunset, I think, “Here is my solitude”. The transatlantic love notes, and in New Jersey, in Patterson, the women with their infinite nails, deathly, the tiny palm trees from a foreign beach, they kiss my cheek, staining it with Chinese chemicals. Me, resenting the mousy boys for loving the mousy girls, my refuge in the window to window hope, “I saw America today, looking like her mother, looking like her father.” The folded Amish hands, beaded atop the wood, my malting angel choking the beer bottle neck, dancing, dancing, Old Route 402, seeking sunrise behind the pawn shop. Willa Granger |