For Eden, After Breakfast

after Frank O’Hara

I don’t always know what I’m feeling. Somedays,
when the first warm air is holding and the blood
is wiped away from my chest (a rupture) it’s a dream
of you that writhes with the fruit of becoming.     Other days,
I think I could just die at the thought of another
meal cooked, another plate of eggs, another headline.
What I am saying is I want to starve as fortunate people
starve, to drink my morning water from the hands of
someone I love, lips to the lines a mystic 
read at a party and I, not a mystic, believed whole-
heartedly. I don’t believe in anything. I don’t even
believe that I don’t believe in anything. I believe
in bay windows near a cold beach with you. I don’t
believe in capitalism or socialism or any ism that gives 
my mother a fuss. I don’t believe in a free market or a farmers’
market or anything that doesn’t value my desire to starve.
I’m only kidding. I do believe in socialism, and when you 
sing Woody Guthrie to me in a bathtub in Asbury Park,
I’ll almost believe that an era of folks clutching at their
dusty overalls and crying out for rain was the only time
our country was really truly alive—my poor, young,      
gorgeous soul.

JACKIE BRAJE

Jackie Braje is the Programs Director for The Poetry Society of New York and co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Milk Press. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, The Minnesota Review, Waccamaw, The Nottingham Review, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. She is also an MFA candidate in poetry at Brooklyn College.