January 26, 2022
The Truth
- Rahil Najafabadi
I chose the easy route to my dreams — to sleep instead of work, but I am awake for your auditions before the play has been written. There’s a fireplace like the one at The Marlton hotel, framing my heart while it races to the meter of my silence. True art is having a showroom for the big paintings of fellow sleepers –– the work I will display on white walls that I painted for others. You were right. I am doing this for myself and not for them. I write with the life of flowers, they survive, turn toward the sunlight and photosensitize. But now I want to paint a picture that would look pretty from your eyes. You have the color of a flower and I will twist and dance with you to see the sun and grow. The soil needs you, just like every flower. You make a character convincing in a play and I will never cut your stem.
January 25, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Most mornings begin with the sound of birds chirping. Over the last few days, the sound of a saw cutting wood in the distance has joined them. It’s a blend that matches the city’s frequency: small and subtle sights and sounds of nature amidst more noticeable echoes of human beings: creating, building, working. Today, each time the refrigerator stops humming, I hear the sound of a hammer hitting against a plank of wood somewhere across the way, one or two streets over. The sound of the birds chirping quiets for a while, but with the winter sunlight falling in through the window and warming the space in here, clarity floods the apartment; a resolved and distinct knowing: the birds will land on the fire escape again in the morning, chirping and singing with and amongst the buzzsaw, the hammer, and whatever else may come.
January 24, 2022 by Jordan Myers
I awake to a quiet world. The courtyard outside my window shows no signs of last night’s snow; when I walked up Eighth Avenue and across west 54th Street, then sat down on a bench at the edge of DeWitt Clinton Park for just long enough to watch the ballfield dance a stillness of falling snow beneath the stadium lights. This morning the sun is saying spring isn’t forever away; whispering that April is out there in the realm of all infinite possibilities.
January 23, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
I like the satisfaction that comes with driving down a stretch of highway, of any road, really, that keeps on going. I like how they start and never stop, teasing you to take them all the way. There is a comforting quality to the paralyzed progress of a long drive, the way you can do absolutely nothing and still be moving towards something. I think another version of me could live like that, cocooned in constant motion. I can see her breathing behind the wheel, stories sprouting from the speakers as she presses foot to pedal, ponders her exit and decides to pass it.
January 20, 2022 by Jordan Myers
McCcarren Park
From our archives, Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018
January 19, 2022 by Rahil Najafabadi
January
- Rahil Najafabadi
The city isn’t itself until the sky’s opening takes the cold,
and gives the children time to play. Snow polar bears appear
in New York––they need the cold to stay frozen in the parks.
It’s alright to be cold and to rush under the blankets, the quilts:
We have a home and a candle we can light, but this child
and its polar bear have the warmth to stay outside,
even in the blinding blizzard and the bone-aching cold.
- R.N.
January 18, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Dont Panic - Jamaica, Queens
From our archives, Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018
January 17, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Jamaica, Queens
From our archives, Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018
January 16, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
A specific sort of disorientation spreads across seasons with less sun, the same way it might in summer months when daylight settles in and stays there. Sometimes, on days when I decide that seeing the sun is not on the agenda, I think about Alaska and its dark season. They call it Polar Night. Last year’s went on for sixty-six days. There is something utterly unbelievable about darkness that does not end when the night does. The thought of it lives in that unruly realm of the unusual, where earth reminds us how small we are, how structure is something we’ve made up. It shushes us calmly, pulling the darkness up to our necks like a blanket. I will have to see it for myself, I think, feel it maybe, for sixty-six days.
January 15, 2022 - From our archives - Abigail Conklin’s “I Think it Would’ve Made You Happy” - Issue No. 4 - Summer 2018
I Think it Would’ve Made You Happy
Abigail Conklin
I wanted to call, tell you
how impossible it was
to see the ocean
even as it commandeered
every square inch
of air above the headless cage
of the Manhattan Bridge.
How my breath, deepening,
drew air no longer made lazy
by the 90 degree evening,
but urgent zephyrs
of split-open spring’s
first dispatches of the season:
messengers from Pharaoh.
Your daughter, screaming
from the top of the world.
January 14, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Dean Street - Crown Heights
From Issue No. 4 - Summer 2018
January 13, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Apple Parking - West Village
From Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018
January 12, 2022 - From our archives - Tom Davidson’s “Darius Azmeh-Volpato” - Issue No. 3 - Winter 2017-18
Darius Azmeh-Volpato
Tom Davidson
Mama, you are beautiful as a wraith.
Every morning the world shoots
Out of your corpse under
the wan light of winter
near where the children in the playground dismantle
daisies and hum sweet tunes
to the scarred ants and squelchy pond critters,
out of you gushes the plain windows,
knee-high fences, succulent lawns,
all your astonishing pages unbound,
whispered with intention on down
pillows late at night
when the ashes of our sleeping turn
back to body to fern to ocean jelly again,
and from the crevices in your bones seedlings hover
one hundred fold over children
and beleaguered school administrators
who long to retreat to your painted summer shacks
and attend to the drift of dandelions,
to stand before the coming season and wait in luxury
for the puffed-up owls, slippery foxes, and the mama wolf,
while city life motors on happy in its nature
walloping with clubs the treasured stories, coughing up
a lung defending the drone from the podium, too skittish
to pause for breath, not dwelling on the white sheet
an orderly once placed over your body, Mama –
the one woman who is unseen but heard whose
words alight even on steel girders, with so much love
to give I want to be as open as your body is
with its bulbous sockets out of which grow blazing lilies,
as open as we all want to be when we’re not snarling in time
with the beating heart of the beast scratching the ages on tombstones.
January 11, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Herbert Von King Park - Bed-Stuy
From Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19
January 10, 2022 - winter quiet by Jordan Myers
I have been on the lookout for enormous memories,
the kind that reveal themselves like sleeping goddesses
at dawn: first sunlight, winter quiet, snow everywhere
January 9, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
There is something about the way snow tells a story - falling slowly, settling silently on still earth. It lays itself down page by page, words that carry cold with them covering the ground. An offering, it seems, to us or something bigger, as if saying ‘here is something new to read’ while sketching out a soft saga of steps, a free association of footprints that fight to be seen. One over the other, piled like plots about intercepting lives and all the ways we interrupt one another.