New York

Paris - Prague -

Big City, Lit
Nicholas Johnson

An Arrogance of Windows
Jay Chollick

Inventing Nations
D. Nurkse

i see them, i don’t see them
Angelo Verga

Big City, Lit
Nicholas Johnson

It’s more than a long, dark road. You’re in your car, with everything you need in the glove box, back seat, trunk. You’ve got your smoke, there’s the fog, and some rain, and more fog, and thoughts of searchlights.

Maybe there’s someone beside you--or there will be--for who knows for how long. A guy thing maybe: a city, a woman, warm coffee, more smokes.

Stations drift in and out in the sing-along tease 'til you’ve had enough of the night, the absolute black Van Gogh claimed didn’t exist. All the tricks, like in a Dylan song, play by the roadside shoulders.

It’s what you want: not exactly lost, not exactly knowing where you are, but full of the importance of being elsewhere, speeding toward.

And so you drive on, grateful for the dashboard, steering wheel in your hands, strings of mileposts, tiny reflectors, what’s left of the white lines, rarities the more traveled, rained on.

Smoke, fog, smudge of light on the horizon: The City, allegory-big. You on the way, bridge-buzzed, highway-wired, everything within reach, toward the light, the place where "symbol is the thing itself."

An Arrogance of Windows
Jay Chollick

Despite the knotted rising
of the slopes, up to their peaks
they seem to me, these Catskills,
the emphatic stone Taconic,
to shrivel, sink into their dwarf beginnings
or fade; the Adirondacks fade.

And cities too, the feeble
minor neighborhood Poughkeepsie--blah,
and Utica, and that Kodak town,
the huddled orchards, they all seem pallid now;
but just to me, for I am Southeast to my
haughty city tip--I’m the New York!
And all else--inconsequential meandering
Niagara-nothing rest of it--I blow away.

I am an arrogance of windows: NYC.
I measure worth by length of shadow.
I breathe bellowing, airshaft of the lung.
Sky-scribbled, I am misery and predator,
a homeless box. I’m easy breezy wonderful, I
am a Jew--third finger up!

And Albany, that one’s for you.

Inventing Nations
D. Nurkse

My grandmother’s flesh has grown luminous,
cloudy behind her nylon housecoat.
Since her treatments, she can keep down
only jello, sherry, and whipped cream.
She stays up all night watching old movies:
sometimes she loses her temper, turns off the sound,
and hexes the characters in a language
no one in this city has heard of: by day
she stares at the Narrows framed in her window.
She can no longer identify the flags of freighters
and asks me to, but strain as I may
my vision blurs, and she insists, so I wind up
inventing nations: Liguria, Phoenicia,
Babylonia . . . and she nods. On her wall
Kennedy faces Truman but there’s no picture
of the child dead of consumption
or the child dead of hunger
or the child who was my father
who succeeded, whose heart failed:
all there is from that world is a locket
showing the infant Mozart playing silence
on a tiny clavichord, behind cracked glass.

(Prior publ. Voices over Water (Four Way Books), a collection by the author.)

i see them, i don’t see them
Angelo Verga

i don’t see them, the bearded men
the men who sit, knees tucked in
sneakers on wet midtown street
i don’t see them, waiting
to be fed, hundreds of them
many black, some whites
most young and thin,
a few gray women
i don’t see them
waiting for the bread
the meat, the lettuce,
mustard tomato
at 7 a.m., the breakfast meal
the Franciscan Friars give them
the giant coffee urn at the other end
where they squat and drink and eat
or hide the napkin-covered treasure
for later. i don’t see them
the crusty-skinned, the matted-haired.
i see the smooth-legged, no split-ends
women on their way to work
rushing across the street. i see them.
they don’t smell, they don’t spit.
i pray to them:
i beg for what i need.

(Prior publ. The Six O'Clock News (Wind Publications), a collection by the author.)