Man Playing Sesame Street Theme Song, Metro Center, Washington DC

by Jennifer Van Orman

He’s missing a leg and he sits
at the top of the escalator,

plush navy horn case open
near his wheelchair,
and as I ride up from underground,

I see the sun and hear the music
at the same time.

I think of people I have moved away from,
people I used to call my friends
and realize they are my friends no longer.
None of them ask where I am these days
and I wonder why they don’t wonder.

Waiting at the elevator, I wait.
Waiting at the crosswalk, I wait.

Listen to this man play the same bars,
can you tell me how to get, how to get…


*Jennifer Van Orman is a painter and writer who lives in Portland, Maine.

Audrius

by Jennifer Van Orman

I don’t know my own dimensions
but you are a fine, dark frame,
a house not built.
I am a word not translated
in messy, unreadable print.

On this night, I stumble the plank
of your naked back, want to carve
the black wax of your shoulders.
You grab fistfuls of my hair, knotted pine,
searching

like dreams of finding rooms
where there weren’t rooms before.
We are a perpetual unrolling rug,
a worm circling

around itself, looking for its end,
cut fresh and flat like a celery heart.

Before falling asleep, you tell me of the country
you were born in. I think of letters
I never sent but meant to,
books I’ve been planning to start but haven’t,
things I’ve been starting to say but can’t.

Only that I am running until I set record.
Only whittling until I spark fire.
Only spending until I go broke.