paris

we are drunk after lunch
and lost in the latin quarter—
your footsteps counting cadences,
quick ticks on a metronome
walking us eventually
to the end of this movement.
then, the boulevard saint-michel and
suddenly the seine, opaline in the sun.

after cinque arrondissements
and four or five da capa al fines
in the form of platitudes like
paris is laid out like a nautilus shell, spinning
out from the center and
in barcelona, the buildings looked like
they had hangovers--

finally montmartre, with
the smudge-faced men tying
loose green and red and yellow strings
around the wrists of gullible tourists
in front of the carousel
at the bottom of the steps of sacre coeur.

and at the bottom of those steps i am
at the bottom of a canyon,
with a fray of strings around my wrist
and whines of ghost accordions echoing in my ears,
and flying, dipping, expressionless unicorns
spinning in front of my eyes.

zurich

on top of lindenhof,
lime blossoms and tiny green fruit
hang delicate from tendrils, thin
yellow ribbons strung from the lindens' branches.

we sit, silhouettes under the tangles
of limb and leaf, and in silence
we assume we're alone,
but birds shoot out from under the deck like arrows
at the start of a car engine
like the clearing of a throat.

and they are silhouettes, too,
suddenly so many feathered shapes,
flapping and flying around us against
seamless blue: the sky and
lake zurich, an open mouth
circled by rows of pointed,
snow-capped
teeth.

chapbooks

  (hand-sewn bindings!)

i've only assembled four so far, but i have enough supplies to make about twenty. email me (regimes@gmail.com) if you're interested!

(not a poem)

hello!

i'm going to be making about twelve hand-assembled chapbooks of a bunch of my poems this week. they're $5, but i'll also accept really sweet trades! email me at regimes@gmail.com if you're interested in buying/trading.

or, if you just want to exchange poems, i'd love to do that too. you can email me or just mail one/some my way:

erin berkowitz

198 tremont street, box #141

boston, ma 02116

i have a really sweet typewriter and will whip you up a poem to send right back. so fast!! promise.

i'm not sure anyone actually reads this, but thanks..!

how i spent my spring break in one-hundred words or less

i collected your words like they were winning ends of wishbones. i dried them out on the windowsill and i bottled them up in water-spotted jam jars and i shelved them and labeled them and watched them turn brittle and useless as dull toothpicks. you had a laugh like the hands of ghosts, though. those never stayed in the jars very long. they'd creep out under the lid like they knew the process of evaporation better than you did, slip back into me through the backs of my hands, sink into my bones and

stay for a while.

bridges of bones

i am building bridges made of bones with my bare hands. a yawning sunrise smiling like it's made of bees is spitting up all over the window but i'm keeping busy turning mountains to molehills, testing the ice with my pickaxe. your thoughts are constant paper airplanes in my airspace, though, so i know: she had legs for days and the round mouth of someone you kept your secrets away from, like weddings and widowers. but you spend all your time with typewriter keys now anyway--you'll sink like lead through that thinning ice.

maybe it'll wear off, maybe there'll be an eclipse

the flight of the bird in the egg, your heart rattling in your chest. (it just wants to shake its wings a little. it just wants its feathers caught in something other than the bridge of your brittle ribcage. it just wants to shake off the arteries like hot air balloon tethers and float float float until it finds a happier home, maybe in the poconos.)

i tell it to shh, shh but i am just an outline of something that could be worth listening for and my breaths and hums and sighs are just books you've already read, just static on the am radio.

marlboro twenty-sevens, or the first warm night of the year

still

  sometimes: i want

a cigarette between my lips and my two feet back on your back porch, but i am not

soft like cement.

i am not smart like the

me of one month ago, since

i am sure of my faults now    but not sure of much else,

, , although more times than    some times i wonder if i look as

flimsy as i feel, since

i don't even know myself when i am alone, since

i know this is just some cinematic sprawl of a face and constant

quivering

vigilance

you are a parachute that never opened

without anyone-elses, winter and spring are just two different kinds of gray. one slithers like it's made of scales and silk and the other slips through your fingers like sand, shellacs like sea glass. baby, i've had empty mailboxes and inboxes and bedspace for weeks but my belly's too full of words to care. we all have cocoons made of cracked egg shells, anyway; we are barely living/still fluttering butterflies in glass cases.

now i collect post-sex poeticisms: intentional movements of trees in snow storms, parachutes that never opened. we can laugh until they feel like the tiny silver glints in pavement that are those good moments in Life, but i sleep less and hold my breath longer underwater because of them. and all i learned this summer was how to build bridges, fix transmissions, ride without my hands on the handlebars. one winter i'll settle down in the middle of everywhere, with more no-ones than someones as long as the no-ones don't have teeth as sharp as yours, hands as familiar to so many as yours, witticisms as naked as yours. (sometimes i know from the very backs of my knees that there is no more space left in my body for nothing but the flat spot on the back of my head where i hit the tile falling from my father's arms as a baby with a thick mop of black matted hair implies otherwise,) so this gray may i resolve to be better: eat better, sleep better, speak better, love better, love less--

you felt full of reasons. now i think i made them up: digging between the spokes of the wheels on my bicycle and your tired, squinting expressions in dull light in dive bars. but i don't sink so deeply into bathtubs and mattresses now, now that i have my own raisons d'être: listening to the rain and the radio, egg yolks that shine like opals, winning ends of wishbones, mottled sunlight, people called charlie, a slanted c'est quoi? carved on the tree in the yard the june i turned twelve, your cheeks (pink as peonies).

denouement

we have clumsy names for one another,

asymmetrical and always

in limbo.

we break nails and split seams--

nothing is plumb, level or

square, just

cracked like a cratered half-moon.

brittle like

dried nautilus shells.

forgotten like easter eggs.

i want certain names

back beneath my tongue, ones

i called when your face was too close to mine.

instead i've started misplacing your

palms--stained like

little glass chapel windows--

from memory;

i gave numbers different names as

those hands slid on skin and

peeled back layers

i didn't know i had.

now i count backwards

to fall asleep,

a disappointing

denouement.