You, in New York City

I want something loud enough

you can hear it in the shower, like a gunshot.

But you're living so close to Harlem,

I'm not sure you would even blink.

You tell me about feeding the homeless,

sitting with them on the streets.

I change the subject to art history,

because the one time I worked at a soup kitchen

my ex-con coworker called me a snowflake,

said, with an ass like that you better have a boyfriend,

and all I could do was try not to sneeze from the pepper

all the drunk men shook in their soup.

I've visited New York four times with my mother,

but never lived there. We ate at a gospel church

turned into a pizza joint, balcony still echoing,

and went to see Vermeer at the Met, his girl

with her pearl earring. I tell you all about it,

but you never go. You prefer eating soup

and sleeping on the floor in the apartment you share

with a girl from Colorado you admit to liking

and two Fins, three Koreans, and an Egyptian.

Your English disintegrates the longer you stay.

I pace the kitchen floor when we speak

on the phone, plucking at the cabinet doors

while you figure out where you're going

next. The day you skin your knees

on the sidewalk, you tell me

you're coming back to the Midwest

I'd never give up for good,

back to the cornfields we know.