ARRIVING  AT  ONE’S  INSULT  LEVEL

Deciding to listen to the people in the park.
Stop they said, he’ll jump on your head.
And looking up, I saw a possum balanced grey, taupe, pink tail
fence-sitting high above, looking down.

It would have made sense for him to fall into the grass:
Soft ivy, maybe some bottles of beer to conk out on.

But all that cloudy moment he kept looking all the way down
the other side where he would fall fence length plus retaining wall, onto concrete.

He lifted one leg, he lifted one paw. He looked.
He was unhappy and troubled up there.

~~~~~

BOX

I knew finally I wanted to get into the photographs.

Not so much suffer through another recipe, clean the pots, find homes for the donuts.

Or toy with green icing that in the end does not look magazine original.

A scent of ozone on a summer night, pressure beating down, a chilled forearm.

This could happen tomorrow. This happened today.

All true: turned over pot of dirt, the dire washings.

So much time passes before a legitimate frankness.

And in my mouth lies fattest truths, kisses you can imagine.

An Easter Mass against some dawn. Police watching over it.

Head already on the ground, a bold transaction.

I meant not so much that the poem would be offensively intricate

but embroider out a worth—to say

in a hot tone; golden chicken. Bad enough in its entirety,

the box of photographs sits keenly new.

Bright searing tin rumpled in the ocean, where are we, where is our nerve?

Sun branching and re-branching no matter your angle;

Wide long sighs, cold marble in the dream, the sandwiches to be sad.

Laura muses in Guandong about the way a road at night,

broad like a rock stripe, nowhere to go but some imagination

that could prove apples out of context, their heavy wind-blown
        stances to the left.

Us too tasting like her skirt, viscose and mistaken so often.

It’s a fringe or a frame.

~~~~~

MANIFESTO:  SIGHT

After walking around on Wall Street looking at masks and occupiers and signs, I went back to the place where my car was supposed to be. It wasn’t there. I had looked at the shops next to the spot when I parked. That was where I had parked but I got Chris Moore to walk around the block with me. I kept hoping to remember exactly how I’d driven into the neighborhood so that the endpoint would be somewhere besides the bridal shop I knew I’d parked by. I knew it was gone and a car and its driver were sitting in its place. It was the kind of car you can call like a taxi but not yellow. I made Chris Moore walk up to the high street again and back down. He’s a pretty conspicuous hippie with dreads and 6’4”. We were across the street from where I’d parked and people kept coming out of the apartment building. One guy stopped as the door slammed shut and made a noise and pulled on the door and cursed and walked quickly away.

Is it me, or are the sunglasses getting bigger and darker? People I would never suspect as wanting to have giant television screen type Chanel stemmed glasses have them. Or large loops and frames and panes and even one girl in my class who seems completely upfront was wearing smoked shades during lecture which raised my suspicions about her eye health or her sadnesses.

I walked in front of the car and took a photo of where there was not a no- parking sign where my car had been.

I looked down the street and there were no signs until the corner. Everyone was parked there. The whole block was solid with silent cars.

I called the police, then called the towing part of the police. The last bus to Atlantic City was in an hour on the other island, the other borough. No ticket reported. No ticket the next hour. On the bus, the traffic policewoman said I couldn’t report a theft unless I was stationary. I had to be in the exact spot on the street and dial 911.

Noises on the bus were complimentary and relatively tame until we stopped in Tom’s River. No one was wearing sunglasses; it was pitch dark out except the lights on behind industry. The spotlights were on and I had wished someone would cut them off. I realized the lights above me were on and I turned them off and a man who was not reading anything but listening to his songs with his eyes closed had his bright sodium reading lights on. I put a scarf over my face.

I thought about my laptop in the trunk of my car and that my mother had helped me buy. This poet Brian had just complimented the color of the car, a light peaceful gray blue like sky. You could look at the car from the side on a particular day and it would blend into the sky. It would blend as if it weren’t there, only tonight it really wasn’t there on the street where I’d parked it.

A woman sat down near me on the bus and started to wheeze and groan. I needed to sleep so I left to the front of the bus. I got off the bus so it wouldn’t look so much like I was getting away from her. Then I got back on and sat down. She got up to the front of the bus and sat down in front of me and made her groaning pain noises again.

The driver got on and I had glimpsed his belly before I put my hood up and wrapped my long red scarf around my face including over my eyes. I once read an astrological interpretation of my birthday that suggested I needed to hang pictures of the sea in my dwelling and needed heavy dark curtains if I was to get any sleep. I already had the black-out curtains at the time. I had the scarf for this. I had the hoodie for this.

But despite the scarf I heard the driver say look here I printed out these photos, this is me on an all terrain vehicle, this is me with a Glock, this is me with an Uzi, this is me wearing goggles that aren’t bulletproof, those are splashguards so that when you kill someone the blood doesn’t splash in your eye and give you hepatitis. And I peered over the seat, pulling down my scarf and saw that the nervous laughter he was getting for this speech was from three Haitians, including the woman who groaned in pain. The driver talked about how some people are so annoying when they ride the bus that he just wants to take them out to the side of the bus and something but I didn’t see what gesture he made because I had the scarf over my eyes again.

I went to the back of the bus and slept. I didn’t see any highway lights cracking through the knit. I knew what gesture he made the way someone just said, “Guess how old so and so was when she died,” and I said, “104” and I was correct.

I checked to see if a ticket appeared on-line for my car at 2AM. Nothing.

I checked to see if a ticket appeared on-line for my car at 8AM. It had been towed.

The night before, I had looked and looked at the spot where my car had been and a limo driver was there dozing in his limo instead. It took me a long time to accept what I knew was true, what I saw with my own eyes, what couldn’t be helped by walking around the block trying to find my car in a place I hadn’t parked it. Riding home on the bus, I had thought about having to buy a new car and thought about the place I liked that sold me this towed car in another state and if I took a plane there I could buy a car and fly back and change the title from that state to this state. I spent time thinking this was the best way to get a new car because I would be able to buy it from someone I knew, and someone who had proven their trustworthiness to me since my car has run for five years with very little complaint. This was a delusion.

Everyone in the tow pound had tired eyes. Especially the cops. We all discussed as we waited in line how we had parked in a place that wasn’t marked. No one was wearing glasses. One construction worker from Connecticut had left his registration in his glove box and they made him go with an escort to get it. I had left my registration in the glove box and no one told me to go get it. The construction worker was with his mother who tried to calm him down. The other guy in line wore bike shorts and said, “This is the worst place on earth.” Everyone wanted to lay their eyes on my receipt. I had to wait at a stop sign for a guard to check my receipt.

I spent the day between losing the car and recovering the car teaching for twelve hours: poetry, stories, how to collage. As the day wore on, I struggled as we are all struggling but must do: I could barely keep my eyes open, but I did.

~~~~~

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books 2010), By a Year Lousy With Meteors (collaborative chapbook with Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis) (Dream Horse Press 2012) and Manifest (Switchback Books, forthcoming 2013). Her poems will appear this year in Catch-Up Louisville, Forklift Ohio, and GlitterPony.