Finding Love in the Arthur Kill

Jimmy laughs so goddam hard
club soda drips out his nose
when I tell him kill is Dutch for creek
before he pours me a half-pint beer
Da called a dimey, now a dollar
because, Jimmy says, the treasury's flat
here at the Knights of Columbus bar
where Kearny Ave meets Market St.,
and August bubbles up asphalt.

New Jersey Transit empties a load
of colored or Clorox ladies,
and I guess it's got me thinking, Jimmy,
I hope these worn out women
find meaning in the bleaching of
placenta stains instead of the stuff
of ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
at Perth Amboy General Hospital.

Down the street is the Arthur Kill,
not too far from the catwalks and wharfs
at the refinery where Da, he got
his watchamacallit, mesothelioma
when oil tankers rose like Leviathan
all hours of night and secretly spilled
bilge we swam in that looked like mustard
before the state got goddam serious.

Choo Choo, my girl, used to sing
"My Guy" better than Mary Wells did
on hot summer days in a dinghy
next to petrochemical tanks
that looked like cupcakes, Jimmy,
I swear, vanilla bone white ones
sitting in fields where there weren't any trees
but a dock on which an old man once
fishing flipped the finger at us,

Choo Choo, an ovum in her bikini,
and me, a sperm, wiggling her way,
wet and alive in the Arthur Kill.