Because even in the deep neighborhoods of Queens, Jonathan Franzen
_                _can find a houndshark, the smooth dogfish splayed beneath the bench
of an N train, rotting out, promising an empty car on a Wednesday night

_                _in August, the worst heat of the summer, though some will mind an awful
smell to pose the dead with props—a cigarette, a MetroCard, an open can
_                _of Red Bull—the images posted to Instagram before a transit officer

can carry out the shark in a garbage bag. But, Jonathan, this isn’t figurative.
_                _The dead dogfish is not a metaphor for the end of the social novel. And on
streets where Hindi, Russian, Korean, and Colombian Spanish, by which

_                _you must mean Jackson Heights, are spoken in equal measure, though
you’ll cut Colombian in revision, even here where in 1991 ugly news
_                _could still reach you, no one speaks the dark and vegetating language

of shark. Why bother? Because the first word my niece spoke with proficiency
_                _was goodbye. Goodbye, park. Bye-bye, trees. Goodbye, Uncle Ryan.
There, there now. Goodbye. I’d read on trains that stitched the borough like a syntax

_                _how an elegist submits to the ineffectual, that language is an equation
of the dissimilar, undone as easily as Penelope’s loom. Gone, we say,
_                _and ask something of permanence, an exchange, but the elegist,

inheriting a chorus, sings in half-forgotten grief, and the dead are made to rise
_                _from the churchyard of poems to a votive of April stars. Goodbye, Mommy.
Goodbye, Da-da. Think of my sister, collapsed at the foot of her bed, an artery

_                _hemorrhaging in the frontal lobe of her brain. Think of the EMT who radioed
overdose to Queens East, cardiac dysrhythmia, then held my sister’s head
_                _to the side to draw out vomit with a gloved hand. At the hospital, it took

three men to sedate her, her body decoding each signal as threat, and when
_                _her husband called there was no news—no planned surgery, no tomograph—
so he repeated her name for its simple truth, like an apostrophe, or like a child

_                _learning their way into the new world. Six years from holding his only daughter.
And if grief’s a republic of worthless currency, make it prose, just once. Give it
_                _consequence. Or let him be lonely.