Tag: urban

Excerpt from “Jordan”

You’re 12 years old and you live on Jordan St. You can’t find your neighborhood on Google Maps, ‘cause it’s been swallowed up by another neighborhood with a catchier name. They do that so they can put up more new buildings with shiny glass fronts that shine back at you like a black mirror so you don’t ever forget that you’re outside of them.

At least that’s what your sister, Jaimie says. But you don’t know — honestly, you wouldn’t want to live in a building that looked back at you like that. Your building doesn’t. Yours is made of bricks that look like they’ve soaked up a hundred different colors at some point or another and there’s this certain time of day when the sun is going down and the sky can’t make up its mind if it’s orange or brown, and you swear to God that you can’t tell where the top of your building ends and the sky starts. Your dad calls this the magic hour and when you were a little kid you thought he made that up himself and you hoped that one day you could come up with perfect names for little things like that too.

Jaimie says a lot of things, to be honest. Your dad used to say she was thirteen going on thirty, but she’s sixteen now, so you’re not really sure how old that makes her in Jaimie-years.

She’s always been the one in your family. The smart one. The funny one. The she’s-going-places one. You’re still trying to figure out which one you are. At least you’re pretty sure you’re the one that your dog Felix likes the best because you always sneak forkfuls of mac and cheese under the table for him when your mom isn’t looking, and that has to count for something.

excerpt from “The Balance”

She flicked the corner of the bright yellow metro card against her thigh.

Click.

Click.

The sound assured her that the card was still there in her palm, as real and tangible as the battered Retro 1’s on her feet and the overstuffed backpack slung across her uneven shoulders.

As long as the card was in her hand then she knew it was real. And if the card was real, then her plans were as well. It was her favorite type of proof — a syllogism; simple but impenetrable. She’d always found comfort in logic. It was her business, after all.

An LED screen spanned the entirety of one of the bus stop walls, cycling through an endless loop of advertisements that framed her face like a digital stage light. The red hues of a bourbon promo synthesized the illusion of blush in her pale complexion. Seize life by the glass with Buckshot Bourbon.

The boozy ad faded into a black screen that hung there for a brief, quiet moment; an electronic exhale that she wished she could stretch until her bus arrived to spirit her away.

The public safety warning that followed the whiskey ad cast a pale white halo over her silhouette. Be mindful of your surroundings, the sign warned her in bold white text against a black slab backdrop. If you see something, say something.

Like a tick, she subconsciously complied, glancing up from her MetroCard and lazily scanning her surroundings. She let her eyes come to rest on nothing in particular until the sensory barrage of Delancey street slipped out of focus, regressing into its most elemental forms: shapes, colors — blurs of movement smearing across her plane of vision. She felt safe and detached as the world recessed away from her and she submerged deeper into her own subconscious, playing the different scenarios of what she had to next in her head.

The pulse of a subwoofer thumped her chest as a black SUV passed by and her mind was dragged reluctantly back into the present.

— Jesus, I’m fucking tired, she said outloud to no one in particular but still wondered if anyone’d heard.

Excerpts from “Forty Days”

A year, a whole fucking year. Felt like a decade, but at the same time it felt like the months had all spontaneously combusted, like it was just yesterday that I’d watched Sam’s eyes close. Grey eyes. Brown hair, just like mine. Body diminished into something less than a body. Hollow, weightless, like a bird’s. I could imagine the wind from an open window, he’d asked us to open the window, and I could see the breeze carrying him in its hands, lifting him up, suspending him in motion. I’d wished it would. The wind had my permission to lift my brother from his bed at Mount Sinai, hospital gown and all, and fly him through the window and into the thick orange sky.

***

All the Bedloe’s have some kind of tick. Mine were more sensory – rubbing my face, running my hands through my hair, biting my inner cheek. Adderall makes the ticks come to the surface more, but it also gets me out of bed and helps me sort through the incongruent thoughts, loading them all like small lead pellets into a single shotgun shell. Regulates the headiness of my head. Makes me forget the tiredness in my bones, keeps my boots on my feet, my shirt on my chest, everything in its order, place, fitting the mold I have to fit in order to be a cell in this sea-dwelling organism, Manhattan, to live in my shoe box with its water stains, to take Shay out to dinner now and then, to keep the freezer stocked with middle-tier gin and limes in the fridge and splurge on the $4 organic, mocha, cold-brew, fair-trade, cruelty-free, half-caff, sugar-free, caramel swirl, micro-brewed, iced coffee.

Stained Shirt

Wrapped around the steel wire of your
Frame, the stain of Chardonnay, four
Four bottles that bent the room, and
Turned us out and the purple plume, hand
Over hand, four in hand, crooked knot
That pulls my seams in line but not
In sync, they’re jumbled scattered skittered
And the ice drip that bloomed from our
Limbs, limbing, limping, like cherries bittered
In the jars of liquor my dad kept on the satin wood
Assembled with His hands and stood
To hold the fruits above the head
In the memory of rooms I once said
Were my own, my home, a stone of a place
I keep in my jacket pocket
And feel the weight, iron locket
Tugging the cloth from my chest
To separate, peel back the past, what’s left
Behind is the Now, but I’m not in this
Moment, am I, thoughts vaporing, kettle hiss
And you say you’re sorry for the stain
You left on the shirt, like there’s a shame
In it, but there’s none, lover, friend
Because the redness brings me back
To those cherries, in their jars,
And for a moment I can
Occupy the ghost of those rooms again

Andromeda

It doesn’t scare me to read that the world is ending
It will not be my children
Or my children’s children’s children
That will see the collapse

2.5 million light years away,
Andromeda, you are the closest galaxy to my own
I’m the Milky Way,
And though we can’t feel it,
But I swear I can,
There is a pull between us and
In 4 billion years
We will collide

We have collided before
In the beginning
When all of matter was thrust together in
Beautiful chaos
And our elements slow danced 
Before the great fission,
The concussive Bang,
And we scattered

Now we are not one body
But two

I’m not afraid of the imminent collision,
Though they say it will be the end of ends
Of our world
Because it comforts me
To know that across these soundless
Black distances
We reach out with unseen fingers
And though they don’t interlock,
My fingertips hover beside your own
And I smile to think that
Though we move
As independent bodies in space,
There are unseen contours
In the fabric of space itself
That tug on our bodies
And pull them together

I don’t fear the collision,
The merging of galaxies
Because I can feel the heat of your distant stars
And they give me warmth
In this cold darkness
And I wait eagerly
And patiently
For the day that our hovering fingers
Collide again

Excerpts from Lego House

She stood in the shadow of a monolith, all of her potential looming over her, and she watched her dreams deliquesce into flickering shadows and murmurs. Her feet would never touch the stage of Lincoln Center, she would never see her name in The New Yorker. The future had rushed past her, leaving her behind, bloodied leg in the road. She was ghosting on an LED screen, a shadow of the past chasing the future.

We step out from St. Marks Church, a balloon animal pops, a child shrieks.

“How was it,” she asks. You were perfect, I say, it was great. I’ll relive this moment again and again. She grips my arm tighter. I’m not sure where we’re walking, but we’re moving east, towards the river.

Do you remember those opening bands, I ask her, when we went to Coney Island?

We walk along the East River, lights casting down from the Williamsburg Bridge, skittering across the dark ripples. We pause at a bench so she can rest her leg. She massages her shin and I see the raised purple scar beneath her jeans in my head.

When I was eight I built a four foot tall Lego replica of the North Tower, cementing each plastic brick in place with a mortar of Gorilla Glue, terrified that a careless limb would knock the whole thing down and spill the dream of it across the floor.

 

****

 

I adjusted my grip to a new spot on the subway beam, fingers seeking the cold side of the metallic pillow. I watched the carousel of lights, sickly green and fluorescent orange whir past the window. Watched the doors rattle in their place, remembered to mind the gap. I looked at Arianna and followed her long limbs to the dried-gum-and-piss floors. Her olive-skin was made a patchwork of the green and orange light that trickled inconsistently into the car as we flew past the fields of girders. Her arm muscles tensed as she clutched her duffle bag, lean strips of trained fibers. Her body was functional, her posture effortless, precise. I liked to watch her stretch before and after her shows, uncoiling the tension in her limbs, preparing them to move in ways that laughed at gravity and conformity and then cooing them like a mother after the fact.

I felt unnatural in my seat as I watched her on the stage. Lazy limbs sinking into the cushions and falling at my sides, heavy and useless, pendulums laid to rest without a fulcrum to swing their great swoops from. These silent beasts are hard to bear. 

 

 

Gas Leak, 2015

Beloved son
When the thunder struck did
The sound wave reach your ear
Restless particles
Oscillating against the
Body of matter and gravity
Or was it all silence
Siren screeches

They whisper the walls down
And the smoke licks out from the rubble
And I saw it
First on my phone
Before rushing out of my apartment in the ABC’s
Sprinted to 7th and 2nd
To see the the circus
I double-knotted the laces of my
[Optical white Chuck Taylor’s, 49.99 -2% student discount, eligible for FREE Two-Day shipping]

And in that whiteness I first saw sun
But in the smoked chimney 7th street
The mirage was unsustainable and the
White became abyss to me

And the helicopter blades severed the air
Into sinusoidal hands that tugged at my shirt
And stuttering sound emissions
That shook the flames
Flames that stretched like cat spines
Reaching upward towards the sky
Tadasana, mountain pose of smoke
Fingers of rippling heated air curling up in prayer and pushing
The last structures down into the Earth and
A plume of grey ash bloomed out in every direction
And suddenly you could see into the windows of the adjacent apartment building
Like peeling back the bark from the stalk and
Revealing the cellular structures within the walls
And the whiteness captured them, the starers standing in their windows
Their view of brick and mortar replaced by the trickle of siren lights and shimmering reflections through the smoke
And they stood there, naked and in awe
Looking out at a sudden emptiness
A new angle of space within the familiar cross street
And the city looking back at them
In mutual surprise and understanding
And I felt a sudden shame at looking in at the intimacy of the moment
And turned away and noticed that my
White shoes had turned grey