Vanessa Kowalski

Remind me

again

why we work instead of kiss

8 hours a day

with a brief lunch poem in between

and popcorn for dinner

so i could leave kernels like a crumb trail

to trace back to a time

where i was making it easier

for my biographer

and everything about her was still

odd numbers

There’s something attractive about someone

with a lot on their mind

in New York City someone is always awake

which means that a poem is always happening

always out in the open

because it never really gets dark

except when we walked the bridge after Sandy

everything below 42^nd went blank

we had flashlights then not phones

you could see the Swarovski sign glimmering

while people were stuck in LES elevators

we had a whiskey in a candlelit bar

not by choice but by need,

both the whiskey and the candle

ate dumplings on 2^nd ave across from

The Church

where we left our hot poetry mass tonight

K and I kissed goodbye in front of the

Urban Outfitters on 6^th ave & 14^th

between Twin Tower memorial lights

and the Empire State building lit up

like those ice cream rockets

Vanessa Kowalski is a Polish-American independent curator, writer, editor, and artist. She received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and an MA in Curating, Mediating, and Managing Art from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Her artworks and writing have been featured in publications such as Clog x Artificial Intelligence, Take Shape Mag, Precog Mag, Speed of Resin, Spectra and more. She currently lives and works in California where she loves making a mess and cleaning it up. www.vanessakowalski.com