Dear New Jersey,

With your yellow bird-like people and your people like birds, with your bisected jade skies and your sullen-faced nephews, with your sheets of dark glass replacing lakes, your floating teal dry-cleaners, your saffron clouds clinging to roads that end in staircases,

how you cuddle me as we huddle smoking on the whitewashed porch, while the crows call like broken hinges, as our unborn toddlers build the country's biggest purple Jacuzzi,

how you take my hand with eel-tongue fingers as you whisper about revolutionary-hatted ghosts, about steam-driven disasters in the underground railroad,

which is underneath us, right now, in this parking lot covered with antlers, in this backseat covered with ultramarine velvet, in this shallow hole we have dug in your backyard

to bury the things we cared about and forgot, under our pink and green apple trees, our lawns the color of LSD, under the persistent drizzle that tastes like persimmons and asbestos.