By Selena Spier

                   This isn’t hell, it’s the street.
                   That’s not death, that’s a fruit stand.

                       —Federico García Lorca,
                       Poet in New York


The trees in the arboretum are crown-shy—
see how their limbs overlap without touching.
Equidistant, like strangers on the subway.

But the roots are touching underground.
Last week a stranger told you that they loved you.
Another one told you to get the fuck out of the street

if you’re going to just stand there on your phone.
Some days you’ll get angry at people simply
for existing in your vicinity. For making noises.

And their bodies will be objects, obstacles
to be toppled or overtaken. Inconveniences.
This will be your habitual sin, mistaking the rind

for the fruit. When everywhere there are strangers
checking their teeth in bathroom mirrors, eating
split pea soup out of Tupperware containers,

buying stacks of dollar paperbacks at Codex.
Strangers ashing cigarettes on cobblestones,
strangers with skin tags, eczema, freckles,

birthmarks, burn scars, sunspots, and vitiligo.
Strangers flaying the skin of their forearms
to ribbons in search of invisible insects.

Strangers with coats draped over their arms,
with furled umbrellas dangling from
their fingertips. On Coney Island

a stranger eats seventy hot dogs in ten minutes,
dipping the buns in warm water to soften them.
O brave new world, that has such people in it!

A stranger taps your shoulder on the subway,
she thought you were sleeping. A stranger draws an X
on the back of your hand at the entrance to a nightclub.

Strangers approach to ask you for directions.
To ask if you’ve found Jesus. To ask for a light,
for the time, for a little money. There are strangers

walking heel to toe on painted lines, reciting
the alphabet backwards. There are strangers
pushing strangers’ babies in strollers,

strangers with ghostly tan lines on their fingers
where they’ve taken off their wedding rings,
strangers playing chess in the arboretum.

There are strangers wearing assless chaps
and pearls braided into their hair, strangers wearing
durags and scrubs and inflatable dinosaur costumes.

A stranger touches your face in the dark.
A stranger cups their palms around your lighter.
A stranger becomes your friend, becomes your lover,

leaves his lipstick on your toothbrush.
And you know that you would sacrifice
every conceivable life on the altar of this one.

The lights of strangers’ windows flicker on at dusk
and you’re never lonely. The warm weather
comes and goes for a while, then lingers.

Honeysuckle shoulders through a chain-link fence.
And the golden rhythm holds, you take your
medicine, eat scrambled eggs for dinner,

listen to baseball games on the radio.
And the days slide by like seed pearls
on a string, a countable infinity.

You turn with the seasons.
You sleep through the sirens.
You unlearn the names of the bridges

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Selena Spier lives in New York City, where she works at the nonprofit Brooklyn Poets and co-curates the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.