Brooklyn nights

My neighbor searches his garden by flashlight.
Across the way, another never pulls her shades.
On Fridays, she snaps herself into black lingerie
and makes regular love with a pot-bellied guy.
Out my rear windows, omnipresent televisions
exclaim in a lunar light, an all-seeing blue
lapping over me in a rising tide, starfish too.
Some say all the magic has left the borough
but the dark-haired sisters two houses over,
they still dress in silver lame sheaths and loll
outside their mother’s flotsam-filled bar
luring dry-docked sailors to a watery fate.

On hot Brooklyn nights, the air is so thick and blue
I can open my windows and swim to my neighbors.

Elevated

When the F train rises over the jaded Gowanus
The slapdash fence you’ve all made of your faces
Will be splashed with the paint of the sun
Thrown over the sky above Bayonne
Where giant cranes rush like a herd of giraffes
Towards the last watering hole of the day.

Resurrection-proof

I want to die with Keats in my pocket
along with a jar of honey,
a piece
of your underwear (the one with the bow),
some of Magritte’s nightblue sky,
a coin
for the Ferryman poling the river,

And enough smooth stones to weigh me down,
Proof against the promise of my ascent. 

Matthew Wills lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. His poetry has appeared in Asphodel, Hanging Loose, Pocket Myths: Orpheus, Poetry, St. Francis College Review, and Saint Elizabeth Street.