I.
I once heard that if you eat a fish from the Hudson River, you’ll get dysentery.
If you eat one from the East River, you’ll get pneumonia.
You can go to Sheepshead Bay,
but that’s too far.

II.
Gracie Axelrod tried to kiss the moving c-train,
maybe in a hundred years it’ll be old
and slow enough
for her to smooch.

III.
“None of y’all are honest.”
The bearded blind man with a hole in his collar turns,
sits for a moment.
“Oof”
He stretches his legs out to trip me,
and for a moment he stares and he isn’t blind.
His eyes are darts. Liar.
He trips me to see me, sees me to reach me.
And I can’t bear him.

IV.
The Hasidic man asked where I lived.
I said Harlem.
Beyond Flatbush, he confirmed.
Well, kinda.

V.
Lena moved from Poland in 1972.
She married a New Yorker.
Who are New Yorkers anyways?

VI.
Teenaged Tommy sits on a fire escape.
The kids are inside.
The kids feel warm.
The kids are together.
The kids feel alone.

VII.
I can’t really explain the winter.
I can only say it’s hard to breathe, but it’s worth the smell.

VIII.
Gracie became a ballet dancer at Lincoln Center.
All she wanted to do was dance on the platform.
She didn’t care for the eyes,
she believed in traversing the parallel tracks,
ricocheting between giants.
Forget grace.

IX.
I can’t really explain the winter.
I can only say it’s an unrequited love.

X.
When I was 4, I decided the suburbs would be a fitting place for a child to grow.
Like a tree on TV.
When I was 8, I sat on the Hudson banks of the Cloisters.
I thought, if I could stare past the grime then I could see Battery Park City. It looked pleasant.
When I was 12, I travelled to Venice.
It wasn’t New York, so I felt ill.

XI.
Lena didn’t marry a man,
She married a city.
He saw too much to be a man.
She said “I do”.

XII.
“None of ya’ll are honest.”
Liar.
“You ain’t a good person.”
I fall to reach him, I become blind to see him.

XIII.
Gracie loved ABCD.
There was a point where she could stand between the two tracks,
and feel the miracle of two trains arriving simultaneously.
The thrill of infinite impossibilities compels infinite attractions.
Gracie was truly a dancer.

XIV.
Lena had a child.
One child.
She loved him, she really did.
When he became a skyscraper, when his eyes became windows, when he didn’t sleep at night,
she asked her husband what she had done, what she had done to her boy.
You’ve given him everything, he said.

XV.
Tommy heard about a girl in the paper who was struck by a train.
It was not a suicide.
She was only a few years older than he was.
She could have been one of the kids inside.
She could have been lonely, she could have been warm.
He could have been on the fire escape and looked back and seen that there was a lack of presence, a lack of a girl, a lack of New York.