finding a way in
In New York, fall is losing its mind.
There are trees blazing red and yellow, crisp leaves at my boots, cutting at my ankles, but the air is soft. There’s no need for a jacket, not even for a button-up. It is my perfect autumn. The softness of summer, the absolute abundance of autumn. I’m in Brooklyn for an elopement.
On Saturday, I join a group of poets, all friends of the brides. Many of them write fiction and non-fiction, scripts for film and television — but all of them were poets first. This is a point of difference between me and all of them as I do not write poetry (except a handful of sonnets a professor in undergrad insisted I produce).
There is a debate among the poets about where we should order food from — they’re craving Caribbean or Haitian but all the good places are closed. People are searching their phones. I am trying to figure out the Wi-Fi because I am the only person whose phone does not recognize the network at the house. Everyone else has been here before. They all know each other very well and I know some of them barely, others not at all. Still, it’s delightful to be in their company even if I don’t know a single person they are talking about in the poetry world — while they chatter, we put on Love is Blind Habibi and everyone has thoughts.
“What’s the conceit?” one poet who has never seen the show asks and all of us go in tandem: “The wall.”