This is how to be alone: I split from my walk to scrawl
comparisons, those ones unfound & unliving.
I want to pretend I know it- the gulls, the separating blue
just beyond that guardrail. If I lean close enough
I tell myself I smell the atlantic, our town, you.
& I unwind like the spool tucked in an old cookie tin.

You don’t sew anymore, I do it myself now (I’m too far
away & my bones too grown). A fondness stretches
in my grudging chest, things resented gently waking.
Old dreams come to earth with relenting leaves:
the Hudson is not salty, not pure either. Beneath,
trash scrapes its green innards, brown rolls & billows.
I thought I knew its face- none of it, I know none of it.

Eleni Mazareas (she/her) is a first year at Barnard College. She is planning on majoring in English and Creative Writing and minoring in Modern Greek. When she’s not at the souvlaki cart, you can find her cocooning on the fourth floor of Milstein.