Do Your Best

The saddest time in my life 
was also the time I had the worst haircut
and shared a wall with a man who would, 
each night, take hits from a tank of laughing gas, 
and from out of the dark apartment a sudden gasp, 
then a laugh like popped bubble wrap. 
Nights I sat on the roof with its view of the bridge. 
Nights I thought of jumping. 
The haircut was short on the sides and long 
on the top. It was cool, and so unlike anything 
my Albanian childhood barbers could ever have done. 
They yelled violently into the flip phone
held between their shoulder and their ear, 
always about the money they were losing 
on a laundromat in Jackson Heights. 
My roommate had one gold tooth 
and one empty space where another would go. 
In my room there was a lamp and, as a treat, 
an expensive light bulb, the kind they have
at restaurants where you can see inside it.
Not jumping, more like walking, 
like how Wile E. Coyote, fooled by his own
cutout of a road at the edge of a cliff, 
walks down the fake road, and, in doing so, 
walks off the cliff, takes four or five steps 
with complete nonchalance on pure air 
before the air lets him go. Jumping is something 
one might do off a diving board,
like the one at the community pool
where I spent summers perfecting 
no specific style of jump, but the act itself, 
not the feeling of falling, but the feeling 
before the feeling of falling. 
There were no pools during the saddest time of my life
but I did walk past a fountain every night 
upon exiting the subway. The fountain was lit 
from below so the water wasn’t water
but small balls of glass painted white on the bottom. 
They would shoot out of holes in the ground 
and arc before falling to the pavement. 
Each night it was quiet, maybe it was midnight, 
and there were no other sounds, 
just the sound of the water leaving and the sound 
of the water returning to the ground. 
Between those sounds the world stopped 
and in the moments of that silence the light
of the fountain was diffuse across the parkway, 
as if spilling from out of a cup, as if poured. 
I could see, then, all the thoughts in my head 
suspended in front of me as if from a mobile. 
I could leave them there, and keep walking,
past the Key Foods, and the vape shop, 
and the mural on the wall of the school, 
the one of roots growing, but the roots 
are all hands. I could take my hat off 
when I got home and feel suddenly 
ashamed of my hair, and turn on my lamp 
with the lightbulb I paid extra money for. 
I could lie awake listening to my roommate 
in the pre-dawn blue and watch as that blue grew 
fainter, like when, from the bottom of a pool, 
the blue turns white as you begin to approach the surface.



Reprinted from The Committee of Men (BOA Editions, 2026) with the permission of the author.