discord / the gradual normalcy

[published in Full House Literary]

Well it began with the sirens. And, of course, the sunset with no clouds at all and the gradient sky hanging, dying over the rooftop and up there the wailing didn’t seem so bad.

Someone was playing jazz next door, on a stoop— really playing, several of them sitting out there, well-bundled, their brass fogging with cold and breath. I mulled over whether “next door” in a rowhouse was considered another house, or home, altogether, and who these people were to me. My neighbors were loud and the city far off.

Downwind, on their way to the bay, the tallest buildings spruced up high and glassy and the rest of the rowhouse ordinaries hurried to meet them, an airport out of sight somewhere behind it all, teased only by the flecks of arrivals and departures slipping the skyline, shushing into sunlight, seeking something.

The helicopters were much nearer. They circled overhead, burned through tax dollars, looked fascist and sort of insectile and moved on. The sirens, meanwhile, yammered through the streets below, terribly discordant with my neighbors’ jazz, raising an indeterminate racket from somewhere in this darkening, overpoliced grid, a place unquieted and unmastered. 

But she was in my arms.

And the purples and the reds and the darkening rest of it were distractions behind her hair.

And she was warmer than the bassline, warmer than the night spreading over the babbling block as the birds puffed up in the chill and the choppers wheeled back around and the lights of the city crinkled.

She was tangled into my jacket, tangled into my gradual normalcy. 

She was warmer than cruelty or clamor. 

She was everything a siren was not.