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    How to Love the Empty Air
    How to Love the Empty Air
    How to Love the Empty Air
    Ebook118 pages53 minutes

    How to Love the Empty Air

    By Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

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    About this ebook

    New York Times bestselling nonfiction writer and poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s How to Love the Empty Air reaches new heights in her revelatory seventh collection of poetry. Continuing in her tradition of engaging autobiographical work, How to Love the Empty Air explores what happens when the impossible becomes real―for better and for worse. Aptowicz’s journey to find happiness and home in her ever-shifting world sees her struggling in cities throughout America. When her luck changes―in love and in life―she can’t help but “tell the sun / tell the fields / tell the huge Texas sky…. / tell myself again and again until I believe it.” However, the upward trajectory of this new life is rocked by the sudden death of the poet’s mother.

    In the year that follows, Aptowicz battles the silencing power of grief with intimate poems burnished by loss and a hard-won humor, capturing the dance that all newly grieving must do between everyday living and the desire “to elope with this grief, / who is not your enemy, / this grief who maybe now is your best friend. / This grief, who is your husband, / the thing you curl into every night, / falling asleep in its arms…” As in her award-winning The Year of No Mistakes, Aptowicz counts her losses and her blessings, knowing how despite it all, life “ripples boundless, like electricity, like joy / like... laughter, irresistible and bright, / an impossible thing to contain.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9781938912818
    How to Love the Empty Air

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      Book preview

      How to Love the Empty Air - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

      Author

      MY MOTHER DOES NOT GIVE ADVICE

      to me, at least. Instead she emails inspirational quotes.

      Read this from Tao Te Ching, her email says,

      "Those who know they do not know

      gain wisdom…

      those who pretend they know

      remain ignorant."

      And that’s great news for you, right?

      Because if there is one thing we both know

      it’s that you have no idea what you’re doing!

      I’m kidding! she writes before adding

      in parentheses, all caps: I AM NOT KIDDING!!

      My mother is trying. My mother is skittish.

      My mother is an uncertain north star.

      She knows she guides me, but doesn’t like it,

      doesn’t want to be blamed if everything goes wrong.

      Sometimes everything goes wrong.

      Never fear shadows… she emails the following week,

      they simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere.

      Did you write that? I asked her. No, she says,

      copied it. You’re the one that writes books, I just read them!

      which is only true because she was the one

      born in 1950, and I was the one born to her.

      She made the world open to me. And now

      that my world feels in chaos, I return to her,

      ask her to tell me what to do. She won’t say it.

      Instead she emails articles, essays, quotes, aphorisms,

      and today, a parable:

      Come to the edge, he said. They said, We’re afraid.

      Come to the edge, he said. And they came.

      And he pushed them… and they flew.

      ON TRYING TO ACCEPT THAT I’M NOT MOVING BACK TO NYC

      my skyline, my byline, my buzzer and door

      now you're the dream we lived before

      –Deborah Garrison, from Goodbye New York

      Goodbye to the subway rides, equal parts

      working class pride and early morning dread:

      the hole in the street I literally had to crawl

      out of to get to work.

      Goodbye to the Bowery, who started in my life

      so ragged and worn, and who now is as sequined

      as a showgirl. I like to think I had zero part

      in making you who you are today.

      Goodbye to the Neptune Diner, its 24 hour booths,

      its lox omelets and thick pancakes, the Greek waiters

      whose relentless surliness became a point of pride:

      They liked me.

      Goodbye NYC parks, Washington and Union Square,

      Madison and Tompkins, Central Park in all its gaudiness,

      its enormous expansive excess. Goodbye Astoria Park,

      the one park I called home.

      Goodbye to the museums I never explored, restaurants

      I never ate at, places I read about but never visited.

      Goodbye top of the Empire State. Goodbye Roosevelt

      Island. Goodbye Statue of Liberty, your crown, your torch.

      Goodbye zip code. Goodbye area code. Goodbye saying it:

      I’m a New Yorker. Feeling its weight. I already miss your

      all-night bodega sweepers, your weary taxi drivers,

      the bicyclists who tried to kill me every day.

      New York City, I want to return to you a better woman,

      a better writer. Return to you so clean, you won’t even

      recognize me, so glorious, you’ll dim your lights, so damn

      grown that maybe, just maybe, I can look you in the eye.

      MOVING MEANS THAT YOU HAVE TO TOUCH EVERYTHING YOU OWN ONCE

      Hello, tiny porcelain rabbit

      I’m supposed to use as a ring dish.

      I’m sorry I own no rings.

      Hello, literary journals from high school,

      prom dresses from high school, prom

      pictures from high school, yearbooks.

      Hello, literary journals I’ll never read.

      Hello, water color portraits of guys

      I never even got to kiss.

      It’s good to see you again, empty CD cases

      of CDs I loved. I’ve missed you, soft hoodie

      with the huge ink stain.

      Kitchen, you are my favorite. I dump

      whole drawers of you into boxes. Even

      the ugliest mugs get to hitch a ride.

      Bathroom, we will likely be parting ways

      with most of you. I apologize, half-used

      baby powder. It is not your fault.

      The clothes I stuff into garbage bags,

      which are easier and cheaper than boxes.

      Soon I am left with just the books.

      I take a fat black marker and write on three sides

      of every heavy box: Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction,

      Non-Fiction. Memoirs, Memoirs, Memoirs.

      Poetry, Poetry, Poetry. I slap labels

      and tape, and stack everything in corners,

      until finally, I am alone.

      My suitcase and my sweat, my shaking hands,

      my buzzing teeth. The smashed pair of shoes

      by the door just waiting to leave for good.

      PORTRAITS OF MY MOTHER, FAR AWAY

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