March 9, 2022
The Pull
- Rahil Najafabadi
I sat on the corner of a couch and I stared—
It was your birthday. We always laughed until
a few moments of seriousness broke between us.
I was a child, years behind you in age and wisdom.
I couldn’t make the smile appear. I could only sleep
to lull the pain of a wisdom tooth. Dreams eluded
in the presence of windowed, freezing sleet. The dreams
were real when sleep was not. I woke up and counted candles
on a cake lit up for the numeric evaluation of an Earth
that orbits itself in the time we were alive. Gravity pulls us
—our skin inches lower to a portal toward depression.
I did not blow out the candles on my birthday. Gravity left
from that day. The pull was from a song, a painted picture
on the wall, an unwritten love without rhyme. It hurt; it still hurts.
March 8, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Two towns over and again
who cares where we go
the Sundays view
across autumn
that drive anywhere
Lower East Side
two winters
three seasons
another summer June
March 7, 2022 by Jordan Myers
It’s always easier to run when the wind is at your back. This is especially true whenever you’re running along the water. In Hell’s Kitchen the second best place for a long run is the Hudson River Greenway. Central Park is the best, especially early in the morning or late at night. But from my apartment, it takes about a half mile to get there. The Hudson is only three blocks away, so it’s just easier to get to.
I like running by the water because it’s nice to have a view, somewhere and something to look out across. Central Park has a view but not like the Hudson. Central Park’s view changes a lot, although it’s a better run because you’re closer to trees and grass and away from the cars and noise. It’s also Manhattan’s nearest take on a forest. But from the HRG, the steady view of the river creates a certain calm.
Whether I’m running, walking, cycling, or standing and looking west toward the rest of the United States for a while, New Jersey doesn’t look so far away. Yet, when I think about what it would take to get over there –––– running up to the George Washington Bridge or running down to Lower Manhattan and getting in a car that would most definitely get stuck in traffic while driving through the Holland Tunnel ––– Jersey feels like its on a different continent, or in a different world.
This grey afternoon I ran north two and half miles with the wind at my back while glancing over at the Hudson. The sun was hiding behind the clouds and it wasn’t until I reached that place along the Greenway where you can reach over and touch the highway that I turned back around.
March 6, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
The city has skipped ahead to Spring, it seems, and today the temperature boasts a balmy, before rain air, a thickness that lines the sky with something like invisible ink, writing out when, exactly, water will fall and if you squint you can read them, I think, the words walking on colorless clouds, stomping when they really want to be heard, as though screaming through steps that send them soaring, slipping now past the pages of the troposphere and onto the blank, pleading pavement.
March 5, 2022 - Flako Jimenez’s “Taxilandia”
Flako Jimenez’s Taxilandia presents the truths of gentrification so plainly that it’s easy to forget that it’s a show. Taking the form of a taxi ride for you and one or two of your guests, the show is an homage to Bushwick, the neighborhood Jimenez has called home for more than thirty years.
While the horrors of gentrification in New York have been well-documented, I cannot think of a more intimate love letter to one’s home than Taxilandia. It’s a monologue as well as a conversation. It’s a dedication as well as a prayer. It’s a car ride as well as a theatrical showcase. And since each street he drives across changes moment to moment, no two shows can ever be the same. More reflections to follow.
March 1, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Shadows and light formations string themselves across the night’s sky.
Above Madison Square Park late at night, you can see neon shapes:
all at once they flicker through a maze of silence: quiet & soft, they glow
in circles. As soon as you get up from the night’s bench, the sun will rise:
keep walking west, away from the light. If a siren cries out, stay still, listen
February 28, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Horizontal images turning vertical, still pictures
flowing at dusk: every sleeping memory again
& again: these long, & late, & warm winter nights
February 27, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
Somewhere between concrete and cobblestone I find myself in a garden so lush it looks lost and wonderfully out of place. I’m not sure when exactly the street started to smell like a greenhouse but the scent sits here now and saves my place while I visit my mother’s mother’s house, a couple miles up the road from a small beach that was pleasant enough, with its unobstructed view of the lighthouse and its tame, predictable wavers - but I only mention the beach to say we rarely went to it, my cousins and I. We had our own wading spot, a wilder one, through the woods, past the earthy, overgrown grass of our grandmother’s yard, following the sound of rougher waters, catching split seconds of salty mist in moments when sea clashed with cliffs, running, always, down a narrow path through a garden like this one, so faithfully tended you could smell the adoration in the air.
February 26, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Time is the Hudson River at four in the afternoon
on a Saturday beneath the sunlight of February.
Still, everything changes moment to moment /
Frigid mornings become afternoons just warm
enough for two sweaters and a jacket / keep pace
February 25, 2022 by Jordan Myers
On a bicycle
at night, east
across Bleecker
Street ––– cold
wind, a yellow
taxi, breathing
February 24, 2022 - A short essay on the differences and similarities between masculine and feminine running by Jordan Myers
I like running fast, but not right away. I like running slowly first. I do not like when people describe running slowly as warming up. When I am running slowly I like running slowly for its own sake ––– not in the hopes that I’ll be able to run fast later.
I see running slowly and running fast as two different acts. They’re both forms of loving the body and communing with one’s soul, but their forms are very different. I think of running slowly as integrating all that is maternal into the body, drawing out one’s feminine side –––– luxurious and beautiful ––– there is all the time in the world and right now this running thing is only about pleasure. Those are the words of feminine running.
Masculine running ––– or running fast, or running for pace and time ––– resides at the other end of the spectrum. Masculine running is goal oriented; it is focused on pushing the body to and past its limits.
The term masculine running is not intended to indicate that only men can or should run fast. The term feminine running is not intended to indicate that only women can or should run slowly. I am referring to energetic principles of gender which can serve as a basis for understanding and deciding how we wish to exist within and move through the world. The masculine always includes the feminine and the feminine always includes the masculine.
For instance and with regard to masculine running, the beauty and secret of masculine running is the fact that if it is attempted without a deep understanding and appreciation for feminine running, then it will never reach its full potential. Here is another way of saying this: when I know how to feel good in my body while running, running fast becomes easier.
Masculine running appears to be more challenging than feminine running because through masculine running you’re asking the body to perform very specific and measurable tasks ––– to get from one location to another within a certain amount of time. However, feminine running is just as difficult. The only difference is that the goal of feminine running, to feel an overflowing and deep sense of pleasure in your body, is more difficult to measure.
It is a mistake to think that either of these forms of running are more useful than the other. Although their methods are different, their goal is the same: to experience closer forms of perfection and degrees of strength within one’s physical body ––– and by extension, one’s soul.
Within this very short essay on the differences and similarities between masculine and feminine running I have already expounded (though briefly) on how feminine running can assist and add to masculine running. Before ending this essay I will touch (again, briefly) on how masculine running assists and adds to feminine running.
Before doing so I will admit that the connection is less obvious and that I’ve had to think about this one; whereas, with the opposite (how feminine running assists masculine running), I’ve intuitively known the answer because I have felt it in my body again and again over many years.
This gap in knowledge may be due to the fact as a man I am more used to examining and enjoying all of the ways that feminine energy supports me; and by contrast, I am less attuned to how masculine energy has added to all that is feminine within me. Regardless, still, there is a part of me that is feminine and at the very least, I can consider how the masculine within me has supported and helped that which is feminine within me throughout the years.
I’ve got it: the body that has allowed itself to be pushed to and past its limits through masculine running is stronger and more physically fit than it would be had it only participated in feminine running. Said otherwise, a body that has not been tested and challenged through masculine running loses out on opportunities to gain strength; and that strength plays a vital role in the body’s ability to experience pleasure. The better and stronger I feel in my body, the deeper the sense of pleasure and enjoyment I’ll be able to gain from feminine running.
Here is the central thesis, which I have placed at the very end of this short essay on the differences and similarities between masculine and feminine running: masculine running is feminine running and feminine running is masculine running. They are two sides of the same coin. Yet, if I could travel back in time and start running all over again ––– still, and always ––– I would begin with feminine running. Feel good first. You can always add grand goals and daring challenges later, if you wish.
February 20, 2022 by Elizabeth Lerman
Something strange happens when I sleep too much. I think maybe it’s winter and the way it feels more allowed, the staying still, staying shrouded, half hidden by curtains I cannot close all the way or else who knows how long it might go on, all the purposeful time spent salivating over split seconds in another world and it's not that I prefer one place to the other, though I suppose that’s the problem, it’s that I’m after the unreal, the blurred bodily chaos that comes with waking in the evening and sleeping while the sun is up and everyone else is up with it. They are there and I am here and the separateness of it surges through me like a stiff slap of surreality and the sting, it seems, is a feeling I want to swallow like water.
February 19, 2022 by Jordan Myers
Lunch in Chinatown at the Golden Unicorn on East Broadway: dim sum and dumplings and sweet and sour chicken and all you can drink Jasmine tea. We linger in the lobby downstairs for a half hour, waiting for the host to call out number 92. We take the elevator to the second floor. The dining room is 1980s chic, red carpet, gold chairs, large circle tables with pristine white tablecloths. Gold letters hang along a wall lined with deep red felt at the very back of the room: “Happy Birthday James.” Outside February teeters in between winter and spring. The balmy morning begins with sunlight. By noon snow flurries circle and dance in the air. And at 2:00 p.m. the three televisions inside the Golden Unicorn are all tuned to NBC4; there’s breaking news: a snow squall is headed straight for New York City.
February 18, 2022 by Jordan Myers
I like the way the rain falls in the city ––– all of the sudden. First you hear the rain beating against the tin and glass and steel. It always sounds like the rain is falling faster than it is. Sometimes, sure, there’s heavy rain of course. But more often, it’s just all of the structures between the sky and the ground that the rain beats against. Every downpour becomes torrential. This morning it rained for ten minutes straight. Silence, then heavy and loud and clamoring, then nothing.