I purchased a mass-market grease-spattered cookbook of recipes for hamburger.
I was a mass-market guy, twirling the rotating rack of books near the checkout
counter while waiting to buy cookout-sized packages of ground meat to take home
and slice into chunks and toss in the freezer
instead of making eye contact with anyone in line, preferring to talk to myself
at the stove in my third floor attic apartment while watching grease accumulate
in the cheap scratched Teflon frying pan shedding random chemicals.

Warmer up there than in the basement apartment I once lived in
as long as I could light the gas into flame in the ancient illegal ceramic heater
that later got red-tagged by a man in uniform in another greasy story
that left me cold but alive.

*
To switch gears without burning out my clutch, you’re not supposed to cross the center line
in the tunnel of depression, trouble coming at you, flashing its brights.

*
I slept on an ancient sofa-bed that rocked when you had sex on it
lifting the legs off the ground like my childhood swing set
unanchored and sensitive to rocking. You could hear the springs squeaks
and the legs thud in the kitchen of the apartment below on floor #2
where I lived for a year

where above me lived first a policewoman then a ballet dancer
and the sounds were remarkably similar. Then, I moved up to #3
and things quieted down except in that tiny angled kitchen
where the only sound was sizzling.

*
I wish I had a house that stacked all my apartments on top of each other
so I could revisit each one, drama and all, busted doors and broken glass
and all.

*
On the second floor, I lived with all the furniture of my old live-in girlfriend
from another state, whose moved with me—everything except her.

After she finally showed up to reclaim her stuff, including her milkcrates full
of books, part of her disguise as a cocaine dealer in that small town.
To be fair, jail was involved.

*
Our love affair had a cocaine asterisk. We snorted punctuation
and debt due to overdrawn library books.

I’m still searching for what’s getting lost in translation
from English to Asterisk.

*
The attic was a good place for the addict in me to recover.

A freezer full of ground meat. That way I didn’t have
to go out much.

Thawing could be dangerous due to spoilage.

* Ketchup. White bread. 5 lb. tub of peanut butter
that turned into a sand pail for the beach when empty.

I was so far from the beach, it was just another word
like steak.

A thousand ways to cook ground beef. Mix it up, stretch it out.

*
The goal: stay in the lane in the dark tunnel. Keep the brights
from blinding.

*
To thaw the meat ahead of time was beyond my muted imagination.
Thus, I tossed a frozen chunk in the frying pan and flipped it
like a frozen omelet, slicing off the brown layers
rotating the chunk into a hard pink stone to fend
for itself. An afterthought.

You can add anything to ground beef and make a meal.
Just ask the cookbook.
Soup cans full of grease accumulated.

I can’t explain the satisfaction of slicing off those layers
of meat into the frying pan during those frozen years
but maybe it kept me from slicing myself.

I let it thaw ahead of time now. I drive by the house
on occasion to salute all my old mailboxes.

Marty the owner indulged my moves with good humor, keeping
the security deposit to my soul. So did the mailman.

To Marty, I was a good tenant. He had floors for all my lives.
The move to the first floor was supposed to be the happy ending
but it ended abruptly.

*
I can only juggle so many balls at once, then they start knocking
against the ceiling.

The dancer and the cop both kept odd hours.
I felt affection for them both—grace and security.

Once I heard a gun drop above me. I was eating my bowl
of 3 a.m. cereal and reading the cookbook for new ideas.

Or else I was calculating how much money the drug dealer
owed me that I’d never get back. I refused to sleep on her bed
we’d wrestled up those stairs.

I don’t know what she was sleeping on or with whom.

I put couch cushions on the floor instead. Then on the third floor
I put the same cushions on top of the thin fold-out bed.

Oh, I was a fucking genius.

*
When I lived on the first floor, above my kitchen I could hear
the moans of one journalist fucking another. Wow.
What news!

*
I still see one of the journalists on the streets of this city now
and then and can still hear her animal moans. I make them
under my breath. She pretends not to know me.

*
One drunken night, I entered the wrong apartment.
Oops. They seemed unsurprised. The immigrant Russian couple
who slept under a blanket of aluminum foil
to protect from space aliens.

The Russians used to turn down the thermostat after I’d turned it up,
clomping up the hallway to the second floor. For that entire year,
we never acknowledged the thermostat war. The Cold War.

*
Hey, I’ve got a million of them, but they all come with an asterisk.
Once we had a snowstorm of asterisks. And no shovel.

Once in the middle of that big city, I swear I heard a horse neigh.

*
I was impressed with the way the city picked up garbage then,
dumping out the old steel barrels onto pieces of burlap
then hauling the burlap to the truck.

When the drug dealer came to get her stuff and move it
to an unknown location, a state that has yet to be named,
I told her about the garbagemen. She didn’t believe me.

After all the lies I told her, it was true garbage.

I didn’t believe she had an infection and that we couldn’t have break
-up sex. We argued at the tiny kitchen table while snorting break-up
cocaine. **. Sniffle.

Then we loaded up the U-Haul the next day
but due to that snowstorm, she had to spend one more night.

*
Things never end neatly. My memories of the apartments
in that nondescript house on Denniston Street in Squirrel Hill,
a Pittsburgh neighborhood that I still cannot afford
to buy a house in—wait, where was I?—

the memories stack up, but don’t fit on top of each other
so they tumble over due to
imbalance.

I think that last asterisk was the tipping
point.

Or perhaps it was a semi-colon;
or

*
I was going to talk about crab lice, but I shaved off that part.

* Her U-Haul was smaller than the one I’d rented
to move her stuff in with
while she stayed behind to take care of unfinished
business and ended up lawfully detained.

You can say, well, she shouldn’t have
picked a fight with the wife of the mayor
as I did, but get yourself a snow shovel first.

That cookbook disappeared in one of the moves.
The pages had all turned brown and brittle by then
in the inevitable disintegration of all mass-market paperbacks
or perhaps it was the aliens

but I then I had mostly memorized all the recipes. I could still
freestyle a long recipe riff for any young human
starting out on their own.

Most of them started with a can of cream of mushroom soup
or tomato sauce
both of which make fine receptacles for grease.

*
Once a rat was living in a hole in the front lawn
and the city’s official rat lady came out and stuffed poison
in the hole and we had a fine talk.
She used this metal stick to poke the poison in.
An asterisk on its tip.

We could’ve stood on the sidewalk all day, but she had other rats
to kill.

*
Even though I cried in my cereal—it might have been Chex.
I think I was in my Chex phase then—when I caught myself
nodding my head to the rhythm of the fucking above me.

My crying sounded like a police whistle. The pounding stopped.

At this point in my life, at which ground beef has become a complete stranger
I feel complete fondness for even that sadness
and believe that hearing someone fucking someone else
through walls and ceilings is a kind of luck or blessing

like hearing a horse neighing in the middle
of a city without horses.