February 2, 2022
“Hello”
Rahil Najafabadi
There is no need to anticipate when life is going on in the window. There’s a roughness to winter skin—my lips are a bit dry. The cafe’s chairs are piled outside, the coffee is no longer fresh or even hot by the time I bring it upstairs. Cream and sugar disappear—there are only flakes left of my croissant.
I anticipate the unusual slowness of the city from my bed a bit farther away from the window. I think I can see everything. It’s too cold to take a walk. I measure the climate by population on the street, or the record of foot traffic in the snow. Snow doesn’t sink to my footsteps. But not everyday —I cannot count the doves between us. Instead of letters, I receive crusts of crushed doves for friendship. I can’t see small footsteps from the fifth floor. But I’ll walk outside and slip on the ice anyway, I’ve come to say hello.
- R.N.
February 1, 2022 by Jordan Myers
I like the way the air warms up a little before and after a snowfall. It’s frigid for days and ice lines the sidewalk; you have to pay close attention and take small steps everywhere. Then the warm air moves in and the trucks spray salt this way and that as they drive over and across the streets. Overnight everything changes, and the next day each step is soft, steady, and firm against the new snow. Every intersection is an obstacle, and calculations must be made: where to cross over from the sidewalk to reach the crosswalk. Over the weekend, you had to step up and over and onto embankments of snow. Now those embankments, melted, have spread out at the end of sidewalks, tiny oceans everywhere.
January 31, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
The snow is back and so are cold days cast in daylight, harsh sun settling down on bright white making the untouched beds shine with a color that cannot be captured with words. Blinding might be one but it’s something softer than that because you notice that none of you minds when the light floods your vision. You might welcome it, even, that moment of sightlessness when sun strikes snow, when your senses swell with the season and linger there in delicate suspension.
January 30, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Dusk: up Ninth Avenue and right onto West 56th.
Nightfall: up Eighth Avenue to Columbus Circle,
connect to Broadway / north, right on West 72nd.
Night: north on Broadway to West 82nd. Evening:
south on Broadway to Columbus Circle, back to Eighth
Avenue / right onto West 56th. Beneath the Moon:
across West 56th, back to Ninth Avenue, drifting
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