Two New Yorkers explore the echoes of city girlhood.

I

I keep writing about places I’ve never been to, 
                                 places where the dry field folds itself over the horizon 
and the curves of every long expanse of highway look like 
                                                                        a familiar linearity  
                                            where I confuse
                                                                        abundance for home 

for all I know are train tracks jutting through joints / sidewalk chalk pigment washed away in gutters / steel beam screws as seeds / cement undoing space at the crowded street corner 
      

I keep dreaming about stillness I’ve never known,
                                     stillness that sleeps softly in the sky on a cloudless day 
and holds a body steady enough and sturdy enough to feel
                                                                        a familiar delusion
                                            where I confuse
                                                                        pause for peace

for all I know are imprints from ink pressed under stress / lisping speech spoken two beats too fast / scattered starts and start-overs / memories thumb-tacked to walls in arrangements unfinished 

I keep tracing my fingers around things that have never been / never will be mine 
			                 things that excavate themselves out of our shared skins 
and re/turn, for the last time, to the valleys between my words 
				

II

In New York City, a girl’s marching orders:
you might wonder how we move 
forward in such times (or at all) 

of course — one foot in front of 
another’s, tangled, tripping (do you remember, 
at recess, a three-legged race?)

collective knees succumb to sidewalk scrapes
but when our palms bleed they trickle
trails of knowing on pavement, a whisper:

and, and, and, and 

and every one of our spines measures 
itself against the subway pole (finding 
comfort in the coolness of the metal)

and binding bone marrow to the smudged
fingerprints of wall-street-blazer-pocket and
sticky-grand-central-goodbyes 

and our forearms cramp as we cling
to notebooks (like promises)
so we never forget, an echo:

still, still, still, still

Process

Jackie and Madeline each worked from the same prompt to start a different section of the poem. Every week, they swapped to add a new stanza to each other’s sections. They built off each other’s style, structure, and themes.

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