In Their Own Words
Gina Myers on “New Year’s Day (2018)”
New Year's Day (2018)
champagne bottle shattered
on 4th Ave. paper silver
crown
flattened
9 degrees & it’s good to see you
we warm up
over ramen 2 cups
of tea & memories of faraway beaches
riding the train into Manhattan
I seek a shape to place
my desire into
it’s my heart that leaves
first do you remember
what it was like
to live here? capital
gleams off the buildings
Philadelphia far away
what is the opposite of
a resolution
a dissolution
a disillusion
From Some of the Times (Barrelhouse Books, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Gina Myers
On New Year's Day (2018)
Sometimes the poem comes quickly, like a flash. The imprint of a day—caught in the images one remembers, the litter on a Brooklyn sidewalk. The detritus one accumulates in a lifetime. The first day of the year is supposed to be about resetting and looking ahead. Instead, I found myself in a place I had once lived, visiting with old friends, feeling dislocated from both my present and former lives. There was something unreal and dreamlike about the day. Do I remember what it was like to live here? It doesn’t seem possible that I ever lived there. That life, so incredibly different than the one I had now in Philadelphia. The acute loneliness of riding the train over the Manhattan Bridge, looking out at the city. A strange longing for some unidentifiable thing that I could never reach. And just like that—the poem is gone. Falling apart on the page. Like a memory that comes into focus and then fades away. A snapshot.
