Exit 65

It’s in my blood.
“jerz.”
You know what I’m saying?
My non-native friends call it “the jerz”
but it’s a flexible word.
When I am being frank & vehement
I am “getting jerz” on the recipient of my attentions.
Sometimes it even sneaks up and becomes my name.

I had a Vermonter boyfriend who would ask me to say hot dog over and over
“hot dawg”
“hot dawg”
They just don’t know it like me honey.
They don’t have a skull crammed with goomba-english,
with that special “coming home to cousin Nick in the cucina”
something
that makes it home.
Walnuts, oranges, and figs
a course on their own.
Entire conversations held in yells from different parts of the house.
Trains pulling out of the yard
two blocks dopplered.
Their whistles cry destinations
“Hoboken”
“Hoboken”

The abandoned swimming hole in the woods,
it’s concrete docks, jutting out of reeds like aching molars
and haunted by echoes.
The twisted pine barrens, with their wet sap smell, and the 13th child of Mrs. Leeds.
The bitter and gentle shore, and the Cape May diamonds.
They could not know
So I lie,
content between my devil and my atlantic sea.