BLOG HAS MOVED!

Hello, dear readers!
This is a quick note to let you I am discontinuing this blog at this address and from now on will be posting on my main website http://www.mayastein.com under the menu item "Writing." Here you'll find a link to "One Paragraph at a Time." My posts will continue there!

Thank you to Blogger for hosting me for so long, and I look forward to see you on http://www.mayastein.com for future posts!

- Maya

we are, I am certain

It is not quite four o’clock on the morning

the yellow light coming in that one corner window

from a wayward porch down the block and crickets

still in the throes of their nocturnal chorus. But this reedy hour

is thick with promise, and here the night is broken into two halves:

question and answer, your arm reaching around my shoulders,

fingertips calling my name until my lips find themselves waking

at the rim of your collarbone. And here is where I lose track of the picture,

the narrative slipping from the room like a silk gown,

like the underwear you coax from my hips and nudge to the edge

of the bed, to the floor. We are, I am certain, a single body then,

one long muscle emptied of its muscle, leaning toward the other

as if in prayer, with no one, not even God, as our witness.

underneath this city

The  New York subway tunnels in July hold
an indescribable heat.

We woke early on Sunday. You reached
for me, or I for you, I can’t remember which.

I don’t know these lines well yet. I am a fish
wriggling my way upstream.

You brought coffee, strong and hot, lay it
gently on the nightstand.

I keep thinking about the time that it will feel
like I’ve lived here forever.

Whenever our gaze collides, I am certain I could swim
in your eyes
forever.

A small window of good fortune: the late night train
arriving without a wait.

I go to sleep wrapping arms around you,
even when you’re not there.

Underneath this city, another city.

Love, humming through the tracks.

sweetest relief

It’s not just that she gets me, I wrote

to Jeanette, who lives in Phoenix,

on the way down to New York, in a text message

on the Peter Pan bus with spotty reception,

next to Abby, who has lived on the Upper West Side

for five years and was complaining about the lack

of signage at the Springfield terminal.

Jeanette had written to say, damn I miss you,

and then “what have you been up to?” which is not an easy

thing to explain on the tiny keyboard of a mobile phone.

“Love, baby,” I wrote back. “I feel like I found

a needle in a haystack.” I hoped I wasn’t inadvertently rubbing it in –

I knew Jeanette had been in her own stew of second-guessing,

something gone sour these past months, but I

couldn’t help it. I was gushing. “So lucky,”

I continued. Jeanette wrote back,

“That made me teary.” And then, “It’s no small thing”

and “So very rare,” and I said yes , it was. “But it’s not just

that she gets me,” I tapped on as the bus pulled into Hartford

and I saw the line at the terminal, bare shoulders shiny

from the heat, couples bearing weekend luggage and taking

drowsy pulls from water bottles. I felt, suddenly, quite gluttonous,

full of bright, buttery love for the whole world. “It’s that she likes me,”

I wrote, even though there was no way to do the italics. But Jeanette

is a smart cookie. “Grab hold of it and let it take you,” I read

and the bus pulled out with something between a sigh and squeal

and a moan. “Yes,” I wrote back, because there was nothing left to say.

The air conditioning kicked on again, the sweetest relief,

and we all settled back in our seats, bags stowed,

as the bus made the turn to the highway heading west,

then south, New York on the near horizon, so close

I could almost see her hands stretching toward me,

beckoning.