4. "The guarantee of something bottomless / waiting for me"

It is difficult to write about the new book of poetry by Gina Myers,  A Model Year,  without quoting in its entirety the numberonehitpoem Brazen Youth.  This is why Gina Myers will have to forgive me:

Brazen Youth

Four years advantage in the race
across the street.  Half the pressure,
twice the speed.  The hard-learned
lesson not every pigeon can
be trusted.  Kicking through leaves
November crisp & sneaky sneaks
passing notes.  Who wants to pay
for a soda anyway?  Misused coffee
cups & imagined lives of coworkers
a thousand times better than this
ten to six day in day out.
The imagined lives of forties on rooftops
& fingernails flecked with silver
spray paint.  As if a photograph could catch
it all or catch anything at all.
Carrying the weight of our costumes
through this downward spiral circle pit.
The frenzied youth smashing
up against one another.  Now: counter-
clockwise.  Goodbye lovers &  haters.
Goodbye New York.

Is your heart now broken?  Mine is, but I'm a sucker for "the imagined lives of forties on rooftops," or every life of 99 cent coffees, lost tickets, lost calls, bounced checks.  "It's wrong to fill this longing with a haircut / and new shoes." This is the poetry of a generation for whom everything had been emptied, feeling left only in that moment the body meets the bed. Or as in the poem Saginaw: "The future I was promised / enclosed here in this / brown paper bag."