by Nikki Moustaki

My neighbor comes at one a.m. in her night
clothes to say my toilet’s screaming in the pipes

through her walls, and before I can turn her
away or tell her to joggle the handle she’s got it

disassembled, got her hands wet, and now I
hear the water too, wanting away in our old

shared pipes, trying to spin some long mystery,
filling and refilling the basin, writing with rust

in perfect lines, wasting while the whole town
sleeps, water incognito; my neighbor yanks

the chain, bobs the rubber stopper, the water
rests at last, my neighbor drags her damp socks

back to bed. This embryonic Tuesday flutters
in its darkness around me like a new moth;

crickets; an ambulance; my steam heat ticking
its own old pipes with some other ancient code—

I try to decipher sleep again, hearing the air
above my bed scratch its legs against the ceiling,

realizing I was smothered a little every night
by my toilet, of all the ridiculous things, renegade

water, or some tired bit of rubber permitting
the innocent water through, the hushing music,

like a friend saying don’t be lonely, or I’m lonely too.

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Nikki Moustaki, author of the memoir, The Bird Market of Paris, holds an MA in poetry from New York University, an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, and an MFA in fiction from New York University. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, along with many other national writing awards. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various newspapers and literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks, including The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Publishers Weekly, The Village Voice, and Miami Herald, and her work has been featured in Glamour, O, the Oprah Magazine, Elle, and on NPR. She is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry and the poetry collection Extremely Lightweight Guns.