New Jon Sands Poem

The Fishermen
for J.V. C.H. A.F. E.H. E.M.

Sometimes you dance slow
with your best friend,
while a woman you love
differently than you love Etta James

sings At Last into a karaoke machine
like she wrote it in the bathroom.
Sometimes every person you know is drunk enough
it becomes a new definition for sober.

There is a bar on the west side of Brooklyn
the fishermen call home,
(or they used to, when Brooklyn had fishermen)
like a siren carrying them back to their whiskey.

Sometimes there is tonight, and we are six people.
If we made footsteps that never disappeared,
can you imagine the lines we would have carved out to get here?
There are people who have called us their homes.

Tonight, there is family in the oxygen.
Sometimes, two people is its own person.
It has a lifespan, it gets hungry, it too, can lie underneath its sheets
and wonder how it can still feel alone—

Sometimes it is more.
There is a phone booth in the bar that seats one,
as six of us scramble inside,
we crawl up the walls until even our drinks fit,

and our bodies are rediscovering what it is to be possible.
It is one night when the clocks on a bar in Brooklyn
begin to spill backwards, then stop.
The bartender—still as a stalagmite,

and the perfect pour stays perfect.
The couple at the corner table held like
popsicle sticks in a freezer—
the ovvvvvvvv from I lovvve you suspended in the air

like a vibrating chandelier.
And we, with our slow dances
we with our songs
we with our smiles—
which on any other day are the downswing on a jump rope.

We are the last to go.
We are the last to go.
We are the last to go.