from The Nine-to-Five Sonnets [1]
BY NORA ALMEIDA
Life, friends, is boring.
-John Berryman, Dream Song 14
we are not dead in the shower not
dead on the express train not dead limbs
piling into stairwells not dead yet telephone
noises the universe inserts pre-paid postage Earl Grey
Rosemary’s grandmother take courage thoughts
floating together elevators all over the city
rise in synchronicity the ink bleeding all over
palms in the lobby it’s the image, we’re entertaining
views of St. Francis’ truly alive rain from a fire escape
in the 1970s when the New York electric grid
kept blacking-out on my futon, ghost-like idlewild, a closed eye
and poetry forever turning itself into a kind of ocean,
broken language keeps spreading out like static and so
I keep to my lost corner, my electric space-heater