My mother has always been very laissez-faire about death.
When it's your time, it's your time, nothing you can do about it.
Sharing this philosophy has helped me through many mornings
in the city when everything seems too quiet. Like the morning

after the London bombings when the subways rattled empty
in what should have been the morning rush. My car held me
and five people all of whom were reading bibles.  I thought,
if it's your time, it's your time and counted down my stops.

Living in New York City, it's too easy to imagine you’ll die
in an act of violence just going to work. It's scary and a bit
egotistical, as if the sight of me in business casual is enough
press someone’s small button. But you never know. And so

sometimes I think about what would be left behind, if I were
to evaporate into all that angry burning air: the letters left
unstamped, the half-finished poems, my wandering outlines.
The morning after the bombings I realized that my bag held

three books, all on the lives of serial killers, grim research
for a writing project, sure, but I admit I nearly laughed out loud
thinking about rescuers who would find me; how’d they look
in my bag and think, Whoa, maybe this one was for the best! 

Gallows humor, I suppose, for a dark time. It’s proof of what
I know to be true, this: My city still glitters despite it all.
All that hard-edged fearlessness, those worn bibles on laps,
the cups of coffee sipped from shaking hands. We still shine.

And if it's my time, it's my time, nothing I can do, but do
what I'm doing now, write what I'm writing now, so that if
that dark day comes, the people at my office may smile
when they clean out my desk, its messy collection

of grant applications and dizzy comics, and maybe pause
to wonder at the Post-It note still stuck in my drawer, a line
copied from a book of Chinese love poems which reads:

Today at last a letter came,
and I've lit my lamp a hundred times
to read its words of love.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz founded the three-time National Poetry Slam Championship venue, NYC-Urbana, at age 19. She is the author of four books, including 2007's Oh, Terrible Youth, and her first book of non-fiction, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, which will be released this winter by Soft Skull Press.

This poem was a 2007 Pushcart Prize Nominee.

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