Lee Briccetti is the long-time Executive Director of Poets House. Under her leadership, Poets House developed the Poets House Showcase, an annual exhibit of new poetry books, as well as Poetry in The Branches, a national outreach program that assists public libraries throughout the country in providing poetry services. Lee has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Poetry and has been a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first book of poetry, Day Mark, was published in 2005 by Four Way Books.

Purchase Day Mark here.

Walking the Rat

I was crossing a line drawn in air by a rat down the drain
into a darkness I never hoped to discover.
My husband who loved me with part of himself that was still whole and secure
had let rodents spill out of his hurt like stuffing from a worn cushion
all over our rooms all over the city which is to say
he was beyond himself
but that's not what we called it.

He was waiting in the apartment that would clang shut with a metal lid
bigger than a rat trap but not so big
my mind didn't have to be cut to size
which is to say it was a battle
of such virulence we were locked in our mutually powerless animals
and couldn't recognize ourselves.  And this went on and on.

I preferred walking in the soothing dark in the rat's path
between two points of reference, city's dark cloak lit from inside:
diffuse street light, bars spilling loose spools of laughter.

Tiny eyes beamed out of my anger and the voluptuous shadow
squeezed through the street crevice
flicking its tail like a dream.
My mind wore itself dumb and blind, ribbed with metal disappointments
a little screeching, a little lunging at the bars.

Arguing can be a terrible perversion of sex, all assertion, no glistening hold or connect.

Rat I never wanted to touch, rat I never wanted to see,
rat in my deceptive optimism I wanted to forget.
Old vegetables rotted in the trash behind restaurants
giving the city—yes,
a faint smell of sperm. 

I called from the pay phone
and we walked in the night-city in which we live,
held hands, said very little,
walking the rat in the dark.

Idiom

Weather like a romantic promise
at the beginning of an affair.  It is fun while it lasts:

middle-aged runners sprint and the Russian shoemaker
at Warren praises my Italian boots he respects

though I dragged my heels,ha ha. He’s mastered the idiom
of New York small talk, offers bulletins about family

with mordant joy but never keeps me, unlike the hairdresser
who rails about the Ukraine with sexual insinuation

that leads inevitably to his primary thesis:
America is worse. When I moved here

no services or restaurants, but twenty years go fast,
seem almost coincidental, like meeting the neighbor who travels.

And on the day I lamented I’d never seen DeNiro, there he was,
handsome and short, yipping into a cell phone

in a simple brown suit; one foot listed and the tension
in his stride famously tightened with each step. My fantasy of being seen

helped me see myself: years of anxiety without end, then
whatever the cost, they end. In the bodega where I buy coffee

the employees stutter with vicious glee about an absent
owner. Maggie from the 30th floor is there—agitated, vacant,

still blowing her future up her nose. Mostly
we don’t know each other’s names; it frees the mind

to collect itself and lisp into private concerns.
But we know each other. The way we know ourselves

in dreams—breath of life below identity,
not what we think we are, deserve.

________

In the gap of what was witnessed

How odd to live as we used to.

Needing to reassure: someone reaches a hand, or I say:

“I’ve seen you for years, but I don’t know your name.”