On rainy mornings she can hear home
beating on our bedroom window.
She rolls over but it won’t be gone.
Somehow, our beginnings know where we go.

At least that’s how I felt last Tuesday,
when she asked me how my state got it’s name,
and I saw the narrow roads of south Jersey
blueberry fields next to farmers’ stands made
of rotting wood, poorly painted signs:
Two for a dollar.

How do I tell her?
She only knows what she’s seen on the
Sapranos. She only knows what she’s
heard from Springsteen. She doesn’t know
what it’s like to run through corn mazes
screaming. She never took the curves
of 295 in darkness. She hasn’t gone
off-roading in swampland. At 3AM
she never found herself at a diner
with scrambled eggs and some guy named Tony.

I hear her dreams of evergreens and houses
by the water. Her stories of music festivals,
sour vodka, and rivers reflected in mountains.
And how she used to look up for the Needle to weave
her back to her downtown apartment.
But when she speaks of swimming at Madison Beach
I see Avalon, Margate, Cape May.
She is stepping into Lake Washington.
I am standing on the boardwalk watching the ocean.

The rain on our bedroom window, warm and foreign,
rolls us back to now, to this moment
when dried up palms are what we see fall
where we hold eachother trying to explain where it was
we came from.

I told her it was like trying to cut a tomato
with a plastic knife.

She said “It feels more like spilling coffee
on our new sheets, baby.”