Monday, August 10, 2020 - On Coffee & Tea: O Cafe - 482 Sixth Avenue (West 12th Street). by Jordan Myers

The first coffee shop that I ever fell in love with stands at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 12th Street.

It’s named O Cafe, but I call it O Cafe My Cafe; in homage, slightly, to the Walt Whitman poem: O Captain my Captain!

Although O Cafe is the first coffee shop that ever held my heart, it took years (nearly a decade) before I realized that I was in love.

I must have first set foot in O Cafe (My Cafe) on some afternoon or early evening in late August of 2011. That summer, a few days before Hurricane Irene, I had moved to New York and was set to begin classes within the New School’s MFA program.

Distinctly I remember the many transportation mistakes that I made over those first few months in New York. Here’s one: When I was first living in New York I was living in Harlem with my uncle. On the evening of our orientation, which had been pushed back by a week because of Hurricane Irene, my uncle gave me clear and precise directions for how to get downtown from where he lived, 148th Street and Lennox: Take the 3 train.

This was easy enough. The last stop on the 3 was (and is) 148th Street, so even if I wanted to, I couldn’t make the mistake of heading uptown when I meant to head downtown –––– go south, check. I got that part right.

Here’s what I missed: over and over again I checked the address for the building within the New School’s campus where orientation would be held: 66 West 12th Street. Got it, check. 66 West 12th Street, roger. Sixty-six. West. Twelfth Street, copy.

Fifteen minutes later I found myself walking around Lincoln Center, and wondering why the New School’s campus wasn’t nearby. Here’s why: I was looking for 12 West 66th Street!

Maybe this was my first ride ever in a New York yellow-cab: I promptly raised my arm at one of those forever long blocks near Lincoln Center and hailed a cab. At some point I told the driver that I was looking for the New School, and that “it should be somewhere near here,” –––– “Not far from NYU,” I explained.

I can’t remember whether he told me to check the address again, or whether I checked the address again by my own volition; regardless, upon reflection, I knew that I was had, and I found out how.

I know that I didn’t visit O Cafe that night; I was rushed and hurrying into orientation, so I couldn’t have popped in for a tea. There was no time.

But maybe it was a week later; on a Tuesday or a Wednesday evening, sometime around seven in the evening, before an 8:00pm workshop with Elaine Equi or a seminar with Robert Polito. I must have walked in, and not known what to order. This was before I had been introduced to the espresso ––– cappuccinos and lattes were still foreign to me.

All I know for sure is that the first time that I stepped into O Cafe, I was twenty-four and wholly fresh-faced to New York, New York. Here was that city –––– live and up close; and there was my twenty-four-year-old-self –––– curious; excited, and not nearly as prepared as I thought I was for the journey that rested upon the horizon, of which I was just getting my first taste.

Nine years later I can feel and make sense of what happened; and can articulate why I fell in love.

O Cafe My Cafe became a home. I was living with my uncle for the entire first semester and missed having my own place. I didn’t know Harlem, or any other place in the city well, but the corner of West 12th Street and Sixth Avenue became a landing space, a point of stability and consistency.

I must have gone in before class once, and then made a point to go in, again and again, as those first days and weeks and months of my life in New York slipped by. Gradually, I must have grown accustom to ordering a hot tea and finding a place to sit within the cafe –––– which has expanded since 2011.

I must have fallen in love with sitting near the front of the place, by the giant windows, and watching the men and women ––– and on occasion, some of which were my fellow classmates (and professors) drift by as they’d walk north and south along Sixth Avenue.

I must have loved writing and reading poems for class there. I must have loved seeing the same baristas and ordering my go-to beverage, which had to have been a green tea, of a variety of which I simply cannot recall.

Sunday, August 9, 2020 - Fiction Sundays: Jeff Haber “Nobody in a Land of Dripping Green.” - from Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018.

Photography by Adrian Moens - January, 2019. Jamaica, Queens.

Jeff Haber’s “Nobody in a Land of Dripping Green” is a sprint of a short story. And like a sprint, while you’re in the midst of it, you’re not thinking about breathing; your breath; or how to keep enough air in your lungs to carry you over a great and spanning distance. Instead, you’re just moving –––– as fast as you can –––to the endpoint.

One thing that Haber’s story does well relates with its ability to capture and include detailed descriptions of small moments in time –––– moments, which at first glance, may seem unimportant and forgettable, but after further reflection, actually mean quite a bit.

Even while in the midst of a sprint; Haber slows down for just along enough to show us, for instance, how coffee is made:

“I use a rag to pick up the pot and pour the scalding water into the cups, and Dana stirs the coffee until all the particles disappear.”

At times, these small, yet important descriptions are paired with gigantic questions, the type of which, loom over us all:

 “I watch a lizard crawl up the column with the bullet holes and wonder when I’ll die.”

And while sprinting through the present, the story’s narrator also carries us into the future; once we get there, we move just as quickly.

“A month from now I will eat lunch with my dad at Georgia Diner on Queens Blvd to talk about the Philippines. He’ll get meatloaf, and me, tuna salad on rye with french fries. We will walk around the block, each smoking a Korean cigarette, and he will say “These burn quick don’t they.”

______________________

We stop at a roadside fruit vendor on the long drive from the small airport in Butuan.

The rain taps on the wood of the stand. Dana and I wait in the mud while her dad gets three red plastic bags full of produce, including durian. When we first enter through the gate at her grandma’s I notice a rusty sign hanging from the wall that surrounds the property. I ask Dana about it but she doesn’t know. After a dinner of fresh fish, backyard-slaughtered lechón, the fruits, and rice, Dana and I remain at the table with her grandma. Everyone else leaves.

Dana mentions the sign and her grandma explains, “I was in the logging industry, and liked business. My husband did not. He was a lawyer. But we never quarreled. We respected and supported each other, and it was not easy. There was a miniature ‘Vietnam’ here for a time. You saw the bullet holes on the column in front of the house. But we got through it together, and we sent the children away because it became too dangerous. I remember, calling them in America. To hear that they were waking up when it was still dark and driving them- selves in the cold to work in hospitals, made me upset. But better that way there than dead here.” She gets up slowly, and Vilma steps forward from the shadows to walk with her upstairs to bed. Under which, Dana tells me, is a loaded AK-47.

Before I came to this giant house in the province of Mindanao, I knew her grandma as a church goer and gambler who lived in a two-bedroom apartment off Parsons Blvd with her daughter and son-in-law, at the same complex as Dana and her family. During parties she sat in a straight-back chair, wearing lots of gold jewelry and watching everyone while petting the shihtzus. I gave her a kiss on the cheek for the first couple years, until Dana showed me how to properly greet and bless a Filipino Lola. Take her hand, bow slightly, and touch her knuckles to your forehead. No one knows her age. And here, with her half-wild dogs, red palm trees, fighting cocks, help, and authority she looks like the younger woman who exists in the pictures on the wall behind her desk in the massive living room. Standing fabulously stoic next to her husband in his dark green three-piece Gucci suit. Laughing over a martini with a local diplomat. She is too wise for the slowness, misery, and loneliness of physical decay, but nonetheless succumbs.

Dana and her family go to sleep but I don’t because I feel like drinking. I grab a bottle of San Miguel and two glasses and sit down at the plastic table on the patio with the men who stand guard through the night. They share one glass among the four of them, pouring, drinking, and passing. I try to speak English with the oldest guy, Al. He teaches me a few Bisaya phrases, but I forget them just as soon as I hear them. He has a warm cowboy’s face with hard-earned wrinkles. We listen to Christian Rock on a transistor radio and smoke my Korean Marlboro cigarettes.

In the morning, Dana slides open the glass door that separates the room we slept in from the one with her sleeping mom, dad, and brother, which is filled with the noise of the air-conditioner. I tip-toe right behind her in a t-shirt, black jeans, and flip flops with socks, for the bugs. She opens a heavy wooden door. Master is snoozing on the pink rug like a smelly old baby. The pungent odor of his white fur reaches my nose as I step over him and gently close the door. Dana pets his head and whispers “good morning.” He barely moves, looks at us warily, and returns to his dreams. Leading a pack of ten dogs must be tiring. He seems to know something we don’t. We wave goodbye to him as if to a withered onion and descend a suspended staircase that spills into a dim hallway the length of a bowling alley.

All along the hallway are big rooms no one has slept in for years. One of them even has a sixties style circular bed, perfect for a soft-core porno. Many years ago, people stayed here because it was the closest hotel-of-sorts near the port at the bay. Businessmen, travelers, prospectors, murderers, and thieves. Dana’s parents told me the house is haunted by the ghosts of these former lodgers.

At the end of the hallway we cross through another door and go down two more flights. Everything is still and cool and a little dusty. Like a museum. We traverse the length of the house in the opposite direction to the kitchen. I am irrelevant and obedient in this atmosphere, my flip flops sound cute on the glossy, smooth stone floor.

Nobody is in the kitchen. Dana fills a heavily-used pot with water and places it on the stove. I find two mugs, instant coffee, and a spoon. We wait for the water to boil and Sai Sai enters, clutching the doll Dana’s mom brought her from America. She’s the child of the house. Marcia, the eldest female worker, is a few seconds behind. Sai Sai tries to tell me something, almost confidentially, about the doll. Dana translates, “You look like my doll’s friend, Bill-Bill.” He’s the ghost only Sai Sai can see. They say she talks to him.

I use a rag to pick up the pot and pour the scalding water into the cups, and Dana stirs the coffees until all the particles disappear. Kittens gather at Marcia’s feet. She shuffles in her slippers across the floor, pries open the busted door to the backyard and kicks and claps at them, giggling. One of them tries to stay, meowing, but Sai Sai darts over and shoves it outside. “It is so early, why are you awake?” Marcia asks us in English. It sounds rhetorical.

“I need to smoke,” I say to Dana. So we walk back to the other side of the house, this time slowly to avoid spillage, reach the patio, and sit on the plastic chairs which are glazed with dew.

The cigarettes are made in Lithuania, burn too fast, and taste much lighter than the Camel non-filters I normally smoke. But they were cheap at the duty free in Incheon. As dawn peels away the grayness of the sky, we soak up the racket made by the hidden birds of the jungle, who scream like a chorus of forgotten souls being stretched on a medieval rack ––– strained waves from different places, possessing a hypnotic and deliberate rhythm. I watch a lizard crawl up the column with the bullet holes and wonder when I’ll die. I envision a weed at the edge of the tarmac at JFK, and the eyeball of a subway rat, and then I let them wilt and scurry. The spookiness is beautiful and so is Dana, drinking coffee in her nightgown.

A month from now I will eat lunch with my dad at Georgia Diner on Queens Blvd to talk about the Philippines. He’ll get meatloaf, and me, tuna salad on rye with french fries. We will walk around the block, each smoking a Korean cigarette, and he will say “These burn quick don’t they.” After we shake hands, I’ll watch him get in his car and head to Long Island before the snow gets worse. Two weeks later he will be dead from a heart attack.

He believed that having kids counteracted the inevitable. That replacing your disappearing elders with brand new humans is simply part of the life cycle of brief joy and then loss. But I don’t know. Dreams are not meant to last longer than you are willing to fight for them, and fuck all the rest.

We finish our coffee and hand the cups to Marcia in the kitchen. Dana’s grandma calls her over to her desk. She tells her to tell me not to give the guys alcohol, as it could impair their ability to keep us all alive if a threat violates the perimeter of the compound. Her grandma says this without lifting her eyes from the stack of browned papers containing all information related to her land and its ownership once she dies, which she continuously edits and revises.

________________________

I’m riding the N6 bus on Hillside Ave at the fringes of Jamaica, staring at Caribbean restaurants I want to eat in, and trekking out to Elmont for my dad’s birthday. His actual date of birth was three days ago on Thursday, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to go see him because Jewish cemeteries are closed on Saturday, if they have gates. I wonder if he cares. Certainly, the cold and speechless November ground doesn’t, under which he rests. His head- stone reads, Best Father Brother Uncle Friend. Centered, in a list format. My aunt, who stole all his money, chose this coffee mug language. The empty plot next to him says much more. My mom bought that, even though they were divorced for almost twenty years and he owed her over $130,000. “So he won’t have to sleep next to a stranger,” she said.

I jump off the bus and skate half a mile down the road on the pebble-ridden sidewalk and enter the labyrinth of dead Jews. I know exactly where to go, and when I get there it’s the same as always. I don’t know what to do or say. I tell the dirt, stones, and dusk that I’ve got a new job at a law firm in Midtown and am making just enough to get by. I say, “I didn’t get you anything because you can’t accept gifts. They don’t mean anything to you. My appearance is the gift, and I know that isn’t much but here I am.” I kick the dirt to make it neater, remove a few weeds from the bush on top of him, and place a rock on the headstone. Then stare down at the ground. A Super 8 film reel plays behind my eyes, showing me the current state of his body, which has been laying here for almost two years.

Not long ago, he was an incarnate mix of Roy Orbison, Charlie Sheen, Richard Benjamin from the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Willy Loman, Robert De Niro’s character in A Bronx Tale, and a tinge of Ralphie from A Christmas Story. The work- ing man, with a Brooklyn accent as thick as his ignorance. He made his name in the garment district by buying and selling odd-lots of discount women’s clothing to TJ Maxx, Conway, and Marshalls. After 9/11, he said “They don’t need guys like me no more,” and eventually found middle income success by selling service contracts for the placement of clothing donation bins on private property throughout the tri-state area. He called himself “the bin guy” and scoffed at anything even remotely “hoity-toity.”

My dad grew up near Avenue J and E 15th street around the corner from DiFara’s and was a wise-guy teenager eating pizza at that place when it opened in 1964. Whenever we went there he’d tell me about how Harvey Keitel was a regular fixture on the corner, and describe the characters who hung around Artie’s Pool Hall, beneath what is now a Flushing Bank. His dad moved the family to a house on Long Island in ’72 and he never lived in Brooklyn again, but eternally praised his childhood there as the happiest days of his life.

I look straight ahead at the countless rows and remember last November, when Dana and I went to a cemetery on Staten Island to visit Alfred Chester. A crazy bald gay Jewish writ- er from Midwood who died in obscurity the same year my dad left the neighborhood.

BQE, Verrazano, Exit 7. I still have my car. We locate the site using a map the cemetery office sent me as an email attachment. The marker is lopsided and disjointed by a tree root. I brush away the various pieces of garbage and plastic bags that litter the ground in front of the tall stone, and then wash it with soap and water. I introduce myself and Dana to this Beloved Brother and Uncle, whose weird stories make me less afraid, and thank Alfred for being a writer. We turn away and get back in the car. The gray sky presses on the windshield. I roll the window down a crack, light a Camel, and faintly hear a little girl’s voice traveling on the wind.

Saturday, August 8, 2020 - James Baldwin’s & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s insight for Huey Lewis and the News. by Jordan Myers

Have you ever heard of Gaia? It’s a website. You can watch yoga videos there. You can follow along with the yoga videos as you watch, but you do not have to. I signed up for a seven day free trial three days ago; though it might actually be an unusual number of days –––– eleven or twelve.

Or I may be remembering the price of a monthly membership: $11.99 if you elect to be billed monthly, or about two dollars less if you sign up for an annual plan.

Gaia is new age. Its goals, as far as I can gather, are well-intentioned and important: transcendence, enlightenment, healing (individual as well as societal); and harmony (on the inside, as well as on the outside). I skipped past the yoga videos. I meditate; but I haven’t reached a point in my life wherein I’m ready and wanting to devote the time and energy that it takes to begin a yoga practice.

With yoga I imagine, one has to ––– like most anything else –––– start from somewhere. Over the last three or four years, with meditation I have found and am developing a deeper and deeper way in. But yoga is different. I can’t find an entry point, nor have I found a motivation for looking for one. I run. And I meditate.

When it comes to physical and mental and spiritual and emotional exercise and development I’m either moving forward or sitting still. I do like the idea of yoga ––– a practice that I’ve long-envisaged as a halfway point in between running and meditation: paying close attention to the body while moving the body, slightly, and not quite sitting completely still. If I do find the entry point into yoga, I’ll first break the news here.

Gaia is more than yoga videos. It’s a place on the internet for people who have grown tired of fighting and scraping by; who have also become (even if only a little bit) disenchanted with the motivational coach-speak of personal development circles; and who also ––– and perhaps this is the most important: have not quite found a religion ––– a spiritual home, in which they can comfortably sink into.

Gaia is new age, but Gaia is NOT a spiritual home. It’s a website on the internet; that’s all. It’s not anything to get wrapped up in or washed away by. One cannot rely upon the videos and articles on Gaia’s website to direct and affirm one’s emotional, mental, or spiritual path. It’s not what the website is there for. And any website which purports to be on the internet for such purpose –––– I would run from, and fast.

Gaia features videos created by people who believe in the power unconditional love, which is a mighty force. A mighty force indeed. A force so mighty that in fact, very clearly I can draw a line between what my life felt like (and looked like) before I had known how to consistently (and at will) experience and enjoy its power.

There is a Huey Lewis and the News Song from 1985: “The Power of Love,” which knows this to be true:

"The power of love is a curious thing
make one man weep, make another man sing
Change a hawk to a little white dove
That’s the power of love.”

Through quoting Huey Lewis and the News, I jest, but only kind of. As it is true, indeed, that the power of unconditional love is, in fact, a curious thing. This much I know for sure: were it not for the power of unconditional love, I would not be here this evening, writing these words.

This is one of the many vagaries and joys of writing: to write at all is an act of love. To get words down is to express that one’s heart is beating; that there is air and breath in the lungs, and that the mind is working through something ––– anything at all. It doesn’t have to be important. It’s love all the same. And even if the words that appear are overflowing with hate, the fact that they’re there at all ––– means love is at work, and a transformation is possible.

This is what Huey Lewis and the News got right: the power of love is a curious thing. And this is where their 1985 smash hit left off: love is curious because its source, as well as its application, are often wildly misunderstood and misapplied. This is one reason why enhancing love with unconditional love can be advantageous.

To go further, I need the help from two of the greatest minds of the last one hundred years: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin. About three months ago I was standing in my apartment and looking out the window, where two helicopters were hovering –––– and for a while ––– above Midtown Manhattan. Our nation (again) was waking up! Enough (again) had become enough.

Through conversations with family and friends and within my own social circles, one common theme that resurfaced, again and again, was the idea that this time –––– things were different. Things had to change -–––and fast. This idea ––– that things were different this

time ––– was a speculation. And like all speculations, the depth of its truth, was only limited by how deeply we believed in its premise. And we, of course, “we” is relative.

Here’s what I knew then, and what I still know now: this time, for me personally, it’s been different. Here’s why: (the power of) unconditional love.

This is what I know and can feel within myself now, which I did not know (nor could feel within myself) when I first heard that Colin Kapernick was taking a knee: Unconditional love is more of a frequency ––– a vibration that one holds and embodies ––– as opposed to any one act (or series of acts), or any one thought (or series of thoughts).

It’s a state. It just is. And once you learn to access this frequency and hold this vibration –––– the frequency and vibration of unconditional love ––– you can watch your world start to change.

Personally, I do not know whether it is possible to reach this frequency and to hold this vibration (of unconditional love), without meditation. Personally, I know that I do not have a chance, at all, to hold this vibration without meditation. The beauty of all of this is that it requires a practice.

This is not a state that is reached once, and then checked off of a list. Instead, the only reason that I can spend this evening, writing these words, and expressing these feelings and ideas, is because I have spent three or four years growing and developing my meditation practice, and working with an incredible therapist and healer, who has revealed to me the truth of my own power, and the value of learning to consistently hold this vibration ––– the vibration of unconditional love.

Perhaps other people can get by without meditating and still embody unconditional love. I cannot.

Let me be clear: it is not that I become harmful, or vengeful, or hateful, or selfish when I am not embodying this state. In fact, I may be nicer to other people when I am not embodying this state. Why? This is because embodying the state of unconditional love includes holding a love, respect, and honor for myself. Saying no when I mean no. And yes when I mean yes. And not appeasing or pleasing for the mere sake of keeping a farcical and fraught sense of peace.

Gaia is new age. There is a lot on their website. I will never watch all of it. But if you click around for a while and watch a few of the videos there, you’ll come across strategies and tips for experiencing healing and empowerment, as well as entry-points for learning to embody and hold the frequency of, of course, unconditional love.

Recently, I was reading Notes of a Native Son, and came across a powerful paragraph regarding the realities of the power of unconditional love. And two weeks ago, I read a piece from The New Yorker’s July 27th, 2020 archival issue “Voices of American Dissent,” which features an important quote from Dr. King.

I will present a passage from Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (“Everybody’s Protest Novel”), and then I will leave you with a quotation from The New Yorker piece, which originally appeared in the magazine’s August 29th, 1964 issue, and was written by Calvin Trillin: “Letter from Jackson - Plane to Mississippi: An encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.” With my entire heart, until next time.  

- Isaac Myers III

_______________________

“But unless one’s ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novels the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream. They are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies. Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern, as the controlling force, the intense theological preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe, the sick vacuities of The Rover Boys. Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence into slavery. The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named joe.”

- James Baldwin.

_______________________

“Across the aisle from King, there happened to be sitting a stocky, nice-looking young white man with a short haircut and wearing Ivy League clothes. He looked as if he might have been a responsible member of a highly regarded college fraternity six or eight years ago and was now an equally responsible member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce of a Southern city that prided itself on its progress. About halfway between Atlanta and Montgomery, the plane’s first stop, he leaned across the aisle and politely said to King, in a thick drawl, “Excuse me. I heard them calling you Dr. King. Are you Martin Luther King?”

“Yes, I am,” said King politely.

“I wonder if I could ask you two questions,” the young man said, and Young, Vivian, and Less, all of whom were seated behind King, leaned forward to hear the conversation. “I happen to be a Southerner, but I also happen to consider myself a Christian. I wonder, do you feel you’re teaching Christian love?

“Yes, that’s my basic approach,” King said. “I think love is the most durable element in the world, and my whole approach is based on that.”

“Do you think the people you preach to have a feeling of love?” the young man asked.

“Well, I’m not talking about weak love,” King explained. “I’m talking about love with justice. Weak love can be sentimental and empty. I’m talking about the love that is strong, so that you love your fellow-men enough to lead them to justice.”

. . .

“Well, I think you are causing violence,” the young man said.

“Would you condemn the robbed man for possessing the money to be robbed?” asked King. “Would you condemn Christ for having a commitment to truth that drove men to crucify him? Would you condemn Socrates for having the views that forced the hemlock on him? Society must condemn the robber, not the man he robs.”

Friday, August 7, 2020 - Postcards from New York. by Jordan Myers

Hi! The theaters are closed (emphasis mine) but that doesn’t stop people from walking around as though everything is open all the same.

It’s not a lot of people, but during the days it feels almost like it could be a lot of people. Please send Covid-19 vaccine right away. New York is sleeping and greatly missing its nights and days of insomnia.

Everyone is eating outside. It’s funny: when you walk down the sidewalk now you walk right by everyone’s brunch, or lunch, or dinner.

Everyone says this is safer than dining inside (because of the virus). It must be true, but this part of our city’s new set-up does seem unsafe: to have forks and knives (and spoons) and asparagus and steak and eggplants and escargot so close to accelerating and decelerating engines ––– also cyclists and pedestrians (who are on their phones and not really keeping an eye out in front of them).

I am doing my best to not sleep and stay awake for our city, but I have to rest my eyes as well. Going to bed now. Visit anytime. Now is the time to buy theater tickets (if you can).

Thursday, August 6, 2020 - “What is a voice? A voice is a sound.” by Jordan Myers

What is a voice? A voice is a sound.

Once a voice becomes a memory,
it’s heard across Fourteenth Street

at dusk. Once dusk falls across

Fourteenth Street the voice becomes

an illusion. The illusion becomes

the voice, which finds its way home.

Home is a memory. It’s also a sound.

A memory fills the room; it also

fills a voice. The voice carries outdoors;

it echoes through the wilderness. June

or December ––– the voice carries

through the space in between the pines

all the same. The voice can spill into tears.

Tears evolve; they become weeping. Weeping

gets swept across West 73rd Street. Street sweepers

push the weeping away from 8:00am to 9:30am.

This happens every Monday and Thursday.

The weeping swept away in the morning light

creates a prayer. The prayer feels like a silence,

but also sounds like a voice: Yours –––– maybe.