September 14, 2021 - Spaces in between buildings where the horizon has broken and the first glints of the day hold in the air for a while, waiting. by Jordan Myers
Light in the city makes itself known through shadows. Spaces in between buildings where the horizon has broken and the first glints of the day hold in the air for a while, waiting. From afar ––– for instance, when examining the city’s skyline from a distance ––– Jersey or Brooklyn perhaps, these spaces in between buildings are difficult, if not impossible to see. From those viewpoints all of the buildings coalesce ––– they become one: “The Skyline.” But once you reach the island, and you begin walking along the sidewalks that line its avenues, and moving across its streets, those spaces in between buildings are evident ––– they’re clear. All of the value of the city lies within their clarity. And the whole world of the city rests within those spaces.
September 13, 2021 by Elizabeth Lerman
I don’t know exactly how far the water has danced me out but I know that my feet cannot find sand and my legs are dangling, loose and liquid, under the ocean’s sweet surface, the gentle rocking of the waves rippling through the walls of my body, skin and self shaking with the sea in its hypnotic hurry to reach the shore.
September 12, 2021 - Field Notes from the US Open - “The Quiet Excitement of Tennis” - Karlton Miko Tyack
In between World War I and the 1918 pandemic, the US Open (then the US National Championship) carried on. It was the only Grand Slam tennis event that year. When my friends and I attended opening day at Flushing’s Billie Jean King Center on August 30th, it was the first time the US Open was actually open in two years. By the end of the day, I realized something. When you and your friends have been kept apart for so long, by way of furloughs and pandemics and politics, the best way to finally come together again, is as tennis spectators.
I’ve always believed that sports can bring people together. I decided that this is especially true with tennis during the contentious first round match between Andy Murray and Stefanos Tsitsipas. As Murray masterfully delivered the first serve, I sat in the audience with my group of five: two Britons, two Greeks, and me, the Yankee in the middle.
My friends Nicholas and Mykos were born and raised in Palaio Psychiko. “If Tsitsipas wins, drinks are on you guys,” Nicholas declared to James and George, the British faction. As for drinks, I’m happy to report that the comfortingly familiar Honey Deuce highball cocktail, with its tennis ball-like melon garnishes, was especially popular this comeback year.
During the early sets, Murray played like his old self, chasing down drop shots and attacking forehands. “Get your credit card out, Nicholas,” whispered James.
Tennis must be the only fast-moving sport in which spectators whisper to each other. To win, players need to sustain concentration for prolonged periods of time; and on this occasion, the Murray and Tsitsipas face-off lasted a whopping four hours and forty-nine minutes. Unlike football or soccer, we tennis fans have to give our energy to the players in a quiet way, to see the wins we’re wagering for. It’s as if politeness is built into the game’s DNA, even in the face of a bet.
Yet the silence doesn’t mean a lack of excitement and strength, or even a lack of drama. After losing the first and third sets, Tsitsipas came back hard and strong, to the pleasure of Mykos and Nicholas. After the excessively contentious and difficult year and a half we’ve had, my friends and I especially enjoyed this polite kind of excitement and competition.
After nearly five hours of play, Tsitsipas did win (6-2, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4), and James and George enjoyed buying Honey Deuces for our friends as much as Mykos and Nicholas enjoyed winning their gentleman’s bet. I bought my own, of course.
Apparently, Andy and Stefanos are still mad at each other. Murray didn’t appreciate Tsitsipas’ multiple and excessively long breaks, and Stefanos didn’t see a problem with abiding by the ATP rules, which allow for one bathroom break during a three-set match, and two breaks during a five-set match. As bad as their match got, the five of us are still friends. In tennis, the rage stays on the court, or between players, where they have an outlet for it.
As each set started, and the announcer asked fans to be quiet and seated, I remembered that tennis is the only sport that audience members are ever asked to do that, with a please and a thank you, no less.
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Karlton Miko Tyack was born and raised in West Los Angeles. He spent summers with family all over New England and studied art history in Massachusetts. Consequently, he’s a fan of the Patriots as well as the Dodgers and the Kings. He also loves the outdoors, dogs, riding horses, and Christmas time.
Karlton worked in the art gallery world for ten years, and moved to New York for an opportunity with one of the city’s auction houses. New York has quickly become his favorite city. He resides on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
September 10, 2021 - Rosa Maks’ "Slow Bye” (Chapter 3)
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2
Now Chapter Three, titled I Lean
I lean on your bar and pick hair out of my hard head
When i don’t have any left i’ll wear a hat, your Indian headdress
Why’d you have to say wounded bird in regard to me once
Now i romanticize
I think I have wing
Or something good and exquisite like that
I live with my mama
Who thinks I’m floppy loopy face stuffing
And that my toenails will soon start to curl
Little hag
Leaning on the bar though you only see nice dark thing flow, sleeve uncuff itself to lay
down on skin lit up green
Floral pattern and embroidered lady bugs
See again i spiral into self self self, self soothing, sooth saying
And you have to read my fantastics
Anyway, I was told i was a little like a dead love
Who died
And who had a piece of art made about her
By tearing at a piece of wood with teeth to render a scream on a face
Tearing at a piece of wood with nails and sharp objects to render agony
I saw this wood
I saw it hung
What exists can’t be lied upon because existing is true, barebone and true
The song you said is mine i’m not gonna name
But it had to do with truth
religion why’d you have to play these songs and say they were mine
Or even sweet jane world anthem
You had to croon it when I was working
Remember when everyone could come and smoke inside your house
and i never smelled so sweaty
I invited guys to the bar you never realized
i think you spoke to both of them about the same thing- piano
They’re not allowed anymore, too sacred the stupid sanctuary
You mimed me as flat horizon
Always there at the same time every week
Yes, okay I admit I have the function of a straight line
But I’ll be done and left
Now is the imperative moment in time you’ve started counting down the months and
estimate the number of nights left to be about seventeen
then I move I say and you stay you say
I can see not ever moving at all, avoiding you on the street and wondering who got my
job
And I can see moving and moving and moving
Where’s the teepee you’ve been talking about upstate
Or the treehouse
I was gonna look for you in it when time come to witness your lungs collapse
Do strangers invite strangers to death bed celebrations, birthdays
Do strangers invite strangers they’ve told they loved there?
How can you say I am your sanity, your best part
Do you know that you tell me about our love
Or do you forget six days a week
Your bumbles about love without desire
are just being careful
Careful is dumb
Because our kids would have great teeth
That’s what you said that’s what you said
Even I desire you, ratty
But we don’t tell my friend
my cutie and i are practically engaged by virtue of turquoise ring and the city of Tucson
He knows anyway
You give me money
When the fish aren’t tipping
During the trinket showers I got
mood ring times two
rust ring
Earring pair can’t wear because little do you know some earlobes are too fat for
earrings!
Hole grow closed in matter of months.
Warps back into flesh.
Model of a car in cream model of a car in yellow small drugs old markers feathered
dreamcatcher moleskine sketchbook book book book and book t- shirt pocket knife
incense watercolor bottle solar charger magic rock times so many wolf den rock rose
bunches baby pumpkin
Things to carry lose over a life lived and wronged.
You know the dice I gave you are important and made in heavy metal for a reason and
you put them right away where I predicted you would, the inside pocket, the inner flap.
God you built a whole thing out of a car bumper and you painted it yellow and said I
could use it to paint except I make print I don’t paint
You painted that room yellow and told me to spend a precious hour in it
So many chances to have played with you but I’m paralyzed at jam sessions I don’t
know the keys and you always drop the tuning to the minors and so I abandon my
instrument for months and now it’s too late for me to jam with you- once, you were on
electric fiddle and I was on stupid banjo noodling around, plugged in and it was good
don’t talk about the Gibson I haven’t touched the blue thing
Then we finally did Mikey came and sat down on the cheap electric drums (I should
mention that I also love Mikey and get so boiling stewing when he is fucking around
always always fucking around)
I took your spot on the guitar so you wandered from bass to keyboard to making
babadaba-babadaba noises on the microphone (by this point Mikey does the look my
way, the me and Mikey look that says hey if we could we would)
And we all trickle down
The sound
You go back to entertaining
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Rosa Maks was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is also a printmaker and is currently trying her hand at a degree in print in Tucson, Arizona. She's also a poet, freelance writer and aspiring banjo player; passions include music, creative writing and long distance bike touring. She has worked as a chess teacher, a bike frame sander, a candle maker and gallery assistant, among others. Too mercurial for her own good, she hopes her non-fiction creative writing and true-story poems speak in her place. You might find her at Rockaway Beach in Queens, dragging her bike through a dune or somewhere far from home, picturing that very image with longing.
September 8, 2021 by Jordan Myers
Outside of Rubber N’ Road
I sit on a wooden bench
and drink the world’s
smallest cappuccino:
all espresso, very little milk
A quick pull
and the rain
keeps falling /
a steady & slow
mist, September
September 6, 2021 by Jordan Myers
Brooklyn at night is a maze and its most vexing entrance is the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.
North 5th to Broadway East, which takes you through Williamsburg beneath the J & M trains,
then into Bushwick, then into Bed-stuy. Or I-278, also known as the Brooklyn Queens Expressway –––
if you miss an exit you’ll end up in Staten Island or Queens in an instant. Then there’s west on Broadway,
which shoots you back toward Manhattan and the East River ––– a half mile and you’re facing Kent Avenue.
People on bikes will be everywhere and they’ll be going both ways. If you look once that won’t be enough.
If you look three times that will be too many. Use caution. You’re in a maze and that maze is a dizzy machine
that always works, You get zero timeouts and you can’t tap out at all ––– Brooklyn on a late summer night.
September 5, 2021 by Elizabeth Lerman
It is a cool seventy degrees in Brooklyn tonight and I am waiting for the sun to disappear behind the grand pillars of the museum while the green of the park floats into the evening, making me breath in some other time and place. The sky is flooded with the color of cold sea, dusk saturating the open air. It smells like barbecue, rain dusted leaves and the start of a new season and suddenly I am walking into the blue, a wave of welcome wind washing over me.
September 3, 2021 - Rosa Maks’ “Slow Bye” (Chapter 2)
Now Chapter Two, titled “Outdoors,”
To walk with you and your big white dogs shitting by the curb was to walk like important
royalty.
Before the taxidermist sent you his eyeballs, your oldest white dog bled from the paws
that dragged on the sidewalk. He bled on the sidewalk across from the sewage
treatment plant. On that walk, you would pick him up every time the rear of him failed
and bent underneath him, picking up puppet parts.
There is a mural on the side of your house.
When we went to the true outside together, we went like thrice or something
Yeah that’s it
And look at this legend made of it by a giant baby
maybe you are right to say I wasn’t used to such kindness, such pure male kindness
Maybe it wasn’t so condescending of you to say at all!
We went to look at a thing you made hanging in a convention center
It was so small hanging there surrounded by eighty million huge paintings
Not long ago you said it embarrassed you
How our yellow cab ride was so quiet after
I split!
You said to accompany you to this event
In a rented dress
Rented shoes
Then you said you were sick then you mentioned another
and another
and another for three years so many events to go to, none went to yet i am not event
material, too soggy and too wispyhaired to concoct any sort of updo
We went to drive your car and we decided it must not like me
Never has a machine said that stuff to me
Like your car did
Shag carpet in the back and parts unscrewing themselves as i drove it down the main
block of our neighborhood
The feather hanging in the windshield will be in the center between my two loopy eyes
until the end of my story
As symbol of old bad glory
Excitement to make the black vehicle move even one clunky time
We met in your black coat to go to the fireplace restaurant bar in the cold weather which
turned out to be closed until the afternoon forcing us into a different, less promising
place.
And perch on the edge of a piece of wood that was a table.
Play chess together and you did not understand much.
I play chess with my dad every week so I’m used to those hands making bad moves in
hopes of ancient sage genius revelation
comin’ out
poor man
I win and we walk back
later you said you knew what they were thinking there to see us together like that
What were you spinning and what for
Went to a show that paired video with instrumentals
To, for some reason, commemorate the Apollo moon mission in twenty nineteen,
and your rich friend was dressed in white playing something electric- it was okay. Folding
chairs and a beer. Then i rode my bike home I don’t know what it means to keep
company I counted all these times on one hand. We don’t do great outside like first
teenagers first time
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Rosa Maks was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is also a printmaker and is currently trying her hand at a degree in print in Tucson, Arizona. She's also a poet, freelance writer and aspiring banjo player; passions include music, creative writing and long distance bike touring. She has worked as a chess teacher, a bike frame sander, a candle maker and gallery assistant, among others. Too mercurial for her own good, she hopes her non-fiction creative writing and true-story poems speak in her place. You might find her at Rockaway Beach in Queens, dragging her bike through a dune or somewhere far from home, picturing that very image with longing.
September 1, 2021 - Humbird’s “Pharmakon” by Jordan Myers
September is going, going / gone. - Humbird
________________________
Last summer, again and again, I found myself listening to the “Your Favorite Coffeehouse” playlist on Spotify. Working from home, most songs on the playlist were perfect ––– the closest thing to a coffee shop when working in a coffee shop was no longer possible. They weren’t country and they weren’t alternative; the closest thing you’d call them would be acoustic, or singer songwriter. The playlist is over seven hours long and is made up of one hundred and twenty-six songs, all of which I have not listened to. Even so, I played the playlist so many times that I must have heard ––– at least once ––– half of the songs. Here are a few standouts: Emily Scott Robinson’s “Better with Time”; Phoebe Bridger’s “Scott Street”; Valerie June’s “With You”; and Au/Ra “Concrete Jungle.” These are light on the twang, though having grown up in the midwest, at times and in very small doses, I find a little bit of twang accessible, and even enjoyable.
Still, of the one hundred and twenty-six songs on the playlist, there's only one that I still find myself going back to, again and again, over a year later. And at slightly over two and a half minutes, it’s so short that I can’t only listen to it once: Humbird’s “Pharmakon.” The tile, “Pharmakon” doesn’t strike me ––– I’ve looked up the word and then forgotten what it meant and needed to look it up again so many times: “In philosophy and critical theory, Pharmakon makes up a composite of three meanings: remedy, poison, and scapegoat.”
I can’t make sense of the lyrics: “Love, you’re a fickle rule. Go home you drunk, you wondering fool.” But there’s so much sweetness and joy in the melody and chorus: “September is going going, going / gone.” Thirty more days.
August 30, 2021 - Mercer Street beneath Houston is lined with bricks / by Jordan Myers
Mercer Street beneath Houston is lined with bricks /
one way traffic moves south; at dusk if you walk
north you’ll see the first few glints of the Chrysler
August 29, 2021 by Elizabeth Lerman
This morning, in the tender moments of quiet before my mind settles on the demands of day, I let myself lay in bed and watch the wind move the outside and listen to the downstairs neighbor play his piano. He pounds the keys wildly and I can hear the wholeness in the echo of his music as it joins the cawing birds and rustling trees in their sweet symphony of sound.
August 27 - Rosa Maks’ “Slow Bye” (Chapter 1)
Now, we read about me me me
This is fantastic. I tell you about fantastic love and the nuance of nerve and thought.
You tell me about the way it looks from way outside the delusion.
Deal, deal, deal, and you’ve shook on it now.
Why do we have to conjure up man in suit when song come on
Why do we have to conjure up man in suit when wanting to write until there becomes
only one subject
Why do we have to conjure up man in suit when spiraling down into displeasures down
down down into distastes and why things are the way they are, with people, the lovely
people we wish to be around
We take this moment, three sentences in to congratulate man-
man, you’ve finished constructing the elaborate obsession. It functions complete, within
my tree.
Chapter One, Titled Normal
Two days ago Monday November 25 I thought you were mad mad mad at me because
the thing got cancelled and you didn’t want me to help clean up the bar or anything at all
and I just left so fast.
In the winter the building is colder than outside and in the summer it’s hotter than the
pavement so you wear ratty sweater or cargo shorts depending on season, but the suit
is year-round and you dress in it on the nights of the shows. There’s a long black coat,
too, to the floor, with an upturned collar, a weird metallic gold thing too, long- sleeved,
frumpy dark pants, and I can’t imagine your shoes except for the sneaker things
Silver cross-bone ring.
Silver cross bone ring tap tap tap
And I love it i love it!
You were in a war and your cousin is a guy who welds boilers and you come from
upstate
All three are true
You played guitar in a million different bands and your hair was long and you went to
school for painting
All three are true
You’ve said so much about a long ago tragedy
And a long ago fire
And our neighborhood, all built up
On the days I came that weren’t nights there were all sorts of things to do back then,
painting the stage clean black, touching up the patchy walls of a white room with a
roller, cranking the elevator to make it go, things taken care of on the internet like e-
mails and advertisements getting done, updating the janky janky website best i could,
making a text box, letting people in, letting them out, helping paint a painting following
projected lines in blue paint
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Rosa Maks was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is also a printmaker and is currently trying her hand at a degree in print in Tucson, Arizona. She's also a poet, freelance writer and aspiring banjo player; passions include music, creative writing and long distance bike touring. She has worked as a chess teacher, a bike frame sander, a candle maker and gallery assistant, among others. Too mercurial for her own good, she hopes her non-fiction creative writing and true-story poems speak in her place. You might find her at Rockaway Beach in Queens, dragging her bike through a dune or somewhere far from home, picturing that very image with longing.