The Fishermen

for J.V. C.H. A.F. E.H. E.M.

Sometimes you dance slow with your best friend

while a woman you love differently than you love

Etta James sings At Last into a karaoke machine

like she wrote it in the bathroom.

Sometimes every person you know is drunk enough

it becomes a new definition for sober.

There is a bar on the west side of Brooklyn

the fishermen call home (or they used to

when Brooklyn had fishermen), a siren carrying them back

to their whiskey. Sometimes there is tonight.

We are six people making footsteps that never disappear.

Can you imagine the lines we have drawn to get here?

There are people who have called us their homes.

Tonight, there is family in the oxygen. Sometimes,

two people is its own person. It has a lifespan,

it gets hungry, it too, can lie underneath its sheets

and wonder how it can still feel alone—

Sometimes it is more.

There is a phone booth in the bar that seats one.

Six of us scramble inside, crawl up the walls

until even our drinks fit. Our bodies are rediscovering

what it is to be possible. It is one night

when the clocks in Brooklyn begin to spill backwards,

then stop. The bartender — still as a stalagmite,

while the perfect pour stays perfect.

The couple at the corner table,

together like popsicle sticks in a freezer—

the ovvvvv from I love you suspended

in the air like a vibrating chandelier.

We, with our songs, with our slow dances,

our smiles — which on any other day

rotate like the swing on a jump rope —

we are the last to go, we are the last to go

we are last —