City things
When you get back to the city —
you say yes to all the city things.
You go to an art opening, and another. You watch a dance performance on the High Line.*
You catch up with old friends, talk to strangers, buy books, and borrow others from the library.
You take the subway, it’s fast and slow, it is a means and also a trap.
You Citibike and that feels better, but the pollen gets in your eyes. You scratch your eyes, which only drives the pollen further inside.
It’s too hot, and then too cold and wet. In the country the weather didn’t bother you, the weather just was. Clothes were things you stepped into, and forgot about. In the city they are a fussy costume you cannot get right.
*
When you get back to the city —
you get sick. The sickness makes your stomach feel like the pinched waist of an hourglass, and your body turns upside down and inside out and out and out, and you wake up pressed between the sheets like a flower in a book.
You get good news in person, and bad news on your phone, at the exact same time.
With the year almost half gone, you browse planners and notebooks, because a part of you still thinks a new one would solve everything.
And then you start to work backwards, in dollars and dates.
How soon can you be ready to go?
Never mind you don’t know where to.
You’re determined to do it differently from your parents. Not secretively, but triumphantly.
You’re excited to give away all the things, or most of them.
*
Your family came to America right around Mother’s Day in 1990.
It was hot and muggy when you deplaned at JFK. Humidity: a new sensation.
You were put up in a temporary apartment, with another Polish family. When the men went out, they told the women not to open the door to anyone.
Your father procured plates, bowls, mugs. Two of each, though you were four, come to America with a duffel bag each: navy blue with red handles. Smaller than you remember them.
You ate in shifts.
On one side of the mug: “Mom, without u,” a smiling orange flower. On the other: “I just go all to pieces,” orange petals scattered.
*
Up and down Seventh Avenue, migrant families are holding down the street corners, holding cardboard signs asking for money.
You don’t have money, you have things.
No one wants your things.
What good is a bowl, if you have nothing to eat from it?
* NOTES
Ethan Cornell, “Sharp Edges, Fuzzy Memories,” at Blue Table Post, by appointment
Huma Bhabha, “Before the End,” at Pier 3 in Brooklyn Bridge Park
Matty Davis + collaborators, “Die No Die (The High Line)”