read

Across me, two Asian looking women sit still. One, with thick glasses, reads a yellowing paper. Microscopic Chinese characters populate the front page. The other woman, lips puckered, closes her eyes every time our train stops at a station.

I have not had a good read since winter. Work pressures, I blame. Too much attention to the boyfriend, a friend tells me, otherwise.

The train surfaces by the Yankee stadium. The surly one gets up and shuffles towards the doors. The bespectacled one folds the paper and leaves it on the bench. She, too, shambles to the exit.

I look again at the paper. I realize it is just a local tabloid. Yesterday’s.

Breathless

The reflexologist exhales hard then starts working on my heart reflex point. I do not flinch. I squirm in pain as he kneads the point that corresponds to my lungs.

Two girls chat loudly in the next cubicle. “Next year, we should do Tibet.” “I won’t go there. Not unless the Chinese stop oppressing,” the other voice trails off to an ecstatic “ahh.”

I open my eyes and see my Chinese reflexologist intent on my sole. I feel short of breath.

Invincible

Four men in wifebeaters play dominos outside the Chinese take out. Bachata blares from the beat- up blue coupe parked nearby.

A silver SUV swooshes by then slams into the light post by the intersection. The boy-driver gets out of his car and fishes out his phone.

I am sore from the gym. I look out of the cab window. The fresh-faced driver is unharmed.

Oblige

Two rookie cops tell off three kids sitting on red egg crates outside the deli. The boys, in dirty white tank tops, oblige and leave. .

Across the street, an Arab woman—is she?—peers suspiciously from her jewel-colored head scarf. My cab rolls on.

This morning, the boyfriend calls. Always in a hurry. “Can’t talk long. Got no load.” I don’t say anything. “You’re sad?” he asks. I remain silent. “That’s a good thing. Only means you really miss me,” he says.

“Yeah, right,” I snap back. “Right,” I say again.

Heavily

A dirty moon sits at the end of the number 7 train track. It’s 2:30 in the morning but the heat still sits heavily on my chest.

I can't stop thinking of the boyfriend. I remember Whitman. “For the friend I love lay sleeping by my side. In the stillness his face was inclined toward me, while the moon's clear beams shone.”

Centuries

Out of whim, borrowed a book from the library today. Not even remotely interested in my loan. Couldn’t resist stepping inside the brand spanking new lib. The one near the shop of this extortionate Korean fishmonger who believes a pound of discard fish heads is as costly as a slab of toro.

Eking out an existence in the world’s financial capital, I am grateful for everything public: public libraries, public radio, public television, and even the spotty public transportation system. I must be a socialist at heart. That if heart is an accepted entry in the lexicon of any self-respecting, card-carrying socialist.

James Joyce famously boasted that in writing his unreadable masterpiece, Ulysses, he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing” over what he meant.

Until now, I yet have to read myself. My life’s a dazzlingly hot mess of inconsistencies. To unpack a single day would keep me busy for centuries. That if I have the time.

Whale-road

A peeling poster of the movie Beowulf clings to the scratched skin of the old bus stop behind the Bronx Zoo. Some bored kid, perhaps, drew a plump dick kissing the lip of the morose warrior.

Never read this grand epic of Old English. Not even the snippets of mangled translations during high school. Was shocked, though, to have easily remembered what the Beowulf poet--this according to my zealot of a junior high English teacher-- calls the sea. The Beowulf poet names it the whale-road.

Kennings they’re called. These descriptive, almost always short, metaphors that amp up the poet’s descriptions in much of old poetry.

Had the Beowulf poet lived today, how would have he, or perhaps, she called New York? Soul-trap?

galileo

just caught my eye
on the uptown 4 tonight.
"...only vain
wandering
in a dark labyrinth."
Galileo wrote this,
the poster claimed.

been four days since
the boyfriend flew home.
how to navigate
summer
without him?