Echoes Spring 2010 by Echoes, the Barnard Literary Magazine

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Echoes Spring 2010

barnardechoes@gmail.com

Staff Editor-in-Chief Caroline Blehart

Managing Editor Morgan Davies

Treasurer

Daliya Poulos

Director of Fundraising

Layout Editor Kate Welsh

Art Editors

Madeline Smith Shay Cornelius

Assistant Art Editor Alyssa Kahn

Shruti Sehgal

Assistant Directors of Fundraising Julie Bodenmann Eva Saavedra

Copy Editors Abigail Arnold Natalie Korman Cecille d Laurentis

Echoes is the official literary magazine of Barnard College.

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My Brotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 21st by Emily Drinker

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NOtes on Beautiful Places Alice Wade

There are no signs to name this town as I pass through just heavy drapes in shattered windows concealing walls from invisible inhabitants brick walls onto which (lettered all in blue) someone’s painted “HERE.” There are no people in these streets no footsteps on pavement none to have held the brush but a man on the roof of a gutted warehouse and he is not the author nor am I. 7

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On Last Night Jessica L. Johnson It throbs, you know my ear, as it extends its lobe, cartilage, skin and curves out to the morning trying with great effort to hear your heart, as filtered through your skin. The air is as dark as hard plastic nets that house speakers. I wonder if we are inside of one nowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; my walls, the backs and sides of it, my windows emitting sound. I imagine we are the music that could overwhelm thumping car radios, on Saturday nights on my strip of Broadway. 8

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Our bodies throb with sounds. Blood plays electricity to our hearts. We have enough energy to emit a song worth remembering. Muscles play the pipes to organs of silence and I miss you. Our lips fusing and flowing playing staccato to limbs, shoving sheets, grasping for each other striking the necessary notes of skin to boom love. Volume. Passion. Increase sublime. Deafening. Closer to silence, to the unexplainable each time you touch me I feel your particular blare of breath-shaking vibrations. 9

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Tending Joyce Ng She outlived him by the ten digits on my hands. Some other reality. What is the scene? Tenfold years, each creasing lighter, so light you couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t starch it. To my mind she died the same year he did. Like the leap year in which he went under. I only ever count the leaps, lessening the years heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gone away, lessening too for my father, the vacuous, frigid emptiness, eerie silence of being physically absent both times it happened. The idea that we are a number counted on, counted for, drawn, pulled, luck, end. Fate is a figure I do not comprehend.

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On my old school coat I stencil stars for him and for her and with the remaining cut-out fabric I keep my own father warm. Warming him, from the silence, cutting grass.

Borghese Gardens by Asiya Khaki

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FraNCE Kate Welsh Day 1, Sunday: Andrea and I are sitting in our Eurail seats, flipping like maniacs through Rick Steves’ French phrasebook and a tattered dictionary, quizzing each other as the green of the countryside whips past our windows. “How do you say ‘grapes’?” Andrea asks. “Les raisins, oui?” “Right.” “What do they call raisins, then?” I grab for the dictionary. We’ve been at this for hours already, in bursts: waiting for our flight in Toronto, on the plane over Greenland, in the train station at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. We try to soak up words and phrases like linguistic sponges, but only some of it stays. Three more hours, two more hours, we chant to ourselves, just a few more hours and we’ll be in Hyères.

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Day 4, Wednesday: I didn’t know that palm trees and pine trees could exist so harmoniously, that cobblestoned alleyways could be so labyrinthine, or that skies could be so blue. I haven’t seen a cloud – not even a wisp – since we arrived. Every morning, after I wake up Andrea and we get dressed, we stumble down the stairs and have brioche with Nutella for breakfast. We laugh with Nathalie about the fact that even after practicing, neither one of us can successfully pronounce yaourt – yoghurt – without stumbling in the tangle of vowels. When we go to our class in the morning, there are cliques of different students, all from different countries around the world. We play the guessing game at break time, trying to identify the language and jumbles of words that fall off the other students’ tongues. During class, we talk about the conjugation of “-er verbs” as easily as we talk about Barack Obama; the proper placement of adjectives as openly as the banalisation of sex.

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It’s the honesty that I love. The frankness. No one hides anything. Even though we’re American, Thierry tells us without worry that he couldn’t hate Bush more. If Nathalie and Thierry argue, or if their grown son Florian stops by and is tired and moody, it’s okay. They argue and they love each other. They’re unapologetic and it makes me wish the entire world lived and loved as they do. Everyone wraps their arms around their loved ones’ waists and shoulders. If you love someone, you’re close to them, physically and mentally. There is no discreet kissing, no coy handholding. Handshakes are firmer. They grip your palm, squeeze your shoulder. You know that people are listening to you because they look you in the eye and say Oui? and Ah, bon! and Non! Vraiment? in all the right places. When you bump into people on the street, there are no Oh! Excusez-moi’s. For a wonderful dinner, there aren’t any formal merci beaucoups. It’s as if the American version of common courtesy is an understood fact.

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Day 9, Monday: In the afternoons, after le déjeuner, we wander. We traipse through smooth, cobblestoned streets, only wide enough for little mopeds. We move under strings of laundry and open painted shutters. There are fluffy gray cats and strangely dainty bursts of graffiti. There are hidden away restaurants and art galleries, open markets and gelato stands. We find modest churches with round windows and marble plazas with modern fountains. On the way back home, we go to the bakery down the street and buy two baguettes. Translating rapid-fire numbers isn’t so hard anymore, and we can count euros as quickly as dollars. If we time it right, we arrive at the bakery right when they take out fresh baguettes. When we ask for deux baguettes, s’il vous plait, they grab two loaves, wrap them up in paper, and hand them to us. They’re so warm still they nearly sear our fingertips but it doesn’t matter. We carry them under our arms, fancy ourselves des filles françaises, and break off the very end. As if you could resist, at that point.

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Day 10, Tuesday: With Nathalie’s question posed as “Do you mind going over to meet my mom? She wants to see you and feed you cake,” how could we refuse? We drove up hill after hill to reach their house and stepped out of the car only to have our cheeks kissed and shoulders squeezed. She had never seen American girls before, and was positively gleeful as she pushed us towards conversation and a lemon tart on the back terrace. We were asked question after question about our lives. When I told them I played soccer, Nathalie’s dad ran inside to find pictures from the days when he had played. Afterwards, with as much lemon tart as we could handle pushed on to our plates by Nathalie’s mother, Nathalie’s dad took us around his garden, puffing out his chest when he pointed out the wall he had built by himself and the flourishing ferns he had planted. We left with more kisses on the cheek from Nathalie’s mom, a strong handshake from Nathalie’s dad, and little porcelain crèche figures – a drummer for Andrea, a shepherd for me – tucked safely in our pockets to remember them by.

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Day 12, Thursday:

We used the adjective “gorgeous” so many times today, it doesn’t sound like a real word anymore. This morning, we hopped on un bateau that carried us across the water to Porquerolles, an island off the coast. Bright blue sky, shimmering water, perfect green trees. When we got off the boat, we were handed to the dock and walked with the masses towards the solid ground of the village. Even armed with Nathalie’s precisely penned directions, we decided to just go. So we followed unofficial looking signs promising that le moulin à vent – the windmill – was up ahead. As we walked along the gravel path, there were olive groves: graceful, silvery green, wise. It seemed hard to think of olive trees in any terms other than Athena. The windmill stands watch over the entire island. When Andrea and I stood under it, we looked to our right and saw how much we had left to explore. So we went straight towards the other side, towards Fort Ste. Agathe, whose crumbling stones seem as wise as the olive trees. We wandered around it, stuck our heads over walls and walked down ancient stairs. But then we saw the beach. We walked down switchback paths, towards the market and what we hoped was the beach. In the village, we bought some sort of sandwich and fresh looking peaches and apricots. And – again with the unofficial-looking signs – we followed a path that looked like it could go towards our beach. Luckily, we guessed right, and we ended up in a spot right before the sand curves. The water was clear, turquoise, beautiful. There was that breeze that you can only feel by the sea, that one that cuts softly through metallic sunrays.

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We ate lunch first. Maybe because of the extra bite of salt air, I’d never eaten anything that tasted so good. The sandwich? Amazing. The apricots? Wonderful. But the peaches. There are no words. Andrea and I laughed when we bit into them. They were that good. We debated going back to get more, but what if that ruined it? What if we could only have peaches that good once? And why had these peaches become our fixation when an entire sea was there in front of us? So, after gnawing the peaches down to their very pits, we started swimming. The water was so cold, our arms and shoulders exploded in goosebumps, but we kept going, swimming far enough out to stand on the sandbar, and paused in something beyond awe. Maybe the salt air had altered something besides our taste buds. Our feet were scraped every time we walked in because of the sharp rocks. Our bouts with goosebumps were practically violent. We were almost out of sunscreen. Standing on the sandbar, though, shivering and joyous, Andrea threw her arms in the air and declared, “I live a perfect, cold life.” On Porquerolles, truer words were never spoken.

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Day 14, Saturday: We’re packed. Suitcases are in the hallway downstairs. Andrea’s made sandwiches, hoping to come close to the perfection of the ones from Porquerolles. We’ve packed part of another baguette, too. Just plain. We’ve decided that we have to savor this one. Just this morning, we were at the beach again. We had a quiet picnic, all of us wanting to think more than chatter. With Thierry’s expertise, Andrea and I take off with snorkel gear, looking at the seagrass that Theirry told us is the lungs of the entire ocean, at little slippery fish, at massive red rocks. We swam farther away from shore than we probably should have, maybe hoping to escape from the inevitability of the train headed towards Paris too soon. We’ve started to begin sentences with “Remember when…” and “When we come back someday…” because it makes it more real. Makes it less the idyll it’s become in our journals, and more of what we lived everyday for two weeks. How are we supposed to leave now? we ask ourselves. We were just getting started. Maybe, though, we don’t ever have to leave. Maybe, a little piece of us — not physically of course, but mentally — emotionally, even — can be stuck with the salt marshes and flamingos. In the cobblestoned, graffiti dusted, moped-wide streets. On the ends of baguettes. In kisses on the cheek. On the Porquerolles sandbar. In falling in love with France. 20

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Piranha Alice Wade My brother once told me that if you drop a cow in the Orinoco the water turns red and the bones come out stripped of flesh. When he disappeared beneath the glassy surface of a quiet lake there was no blood only my reflection disturbed by ripples where a pine needle fell.

Ode to the Blue Koi by Tracy Sagalow

Spring 2010

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Resurrecting Joyce Ng

The monks appeared only as pamphlets on a stand at the entrance of the church. I had mistaken Dominican for Jesuit but turned in the pew anyway. Tourists exempt from service wound around the Model Manger and loitered, waiting for a split-second to get the perfect take, lights framing baby Jesus twinkling red: green: white. I could not dislodge my knees from the worn fraying kneeling pads wedged between pews set to last lifetimes. I knelt, counting dozens of cycles of color, clasping my palms together.

Golden Bird by Leslie Koyama Spring 2010

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Fledglings Morgan Davies […] Anyway it is dreadfully boring here all alone with nobody to talk to but Mother. She is rather far from ideal company, you know, or anyway we are too similar to get on well at all. When are you coming to visit me, old chap? I know you can’t possibly stand Connecticut, of all places, for much longer than a month and a half; it’s a wretched state if I ever saw one (not that I have really seen it, I freely admit). Why ever did your parents decide to raise you someplace so unbearably dull? Anytime you want a little something more cosmopolitan, remember… Cheers, Charlie (Charles Julius Sutherland, II, esq., et cetera) --July 7, 1940 Dear Charlie, Will come first week of August. Fondest, Merritt (Clark, i.e. the only one) P.S. Old chap? 26

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“My dear,” he drawled, “am I to believe you’ve actually taken the subway?” “It’s cheap,” I told him, and he let out an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, murmuring, “Terrible, terrible.” “You really do sound ridiculous,” I told him, easily, as I lifted my suitcase up the stairs at the front of the building. “Tally-ho, old chap, all of that.” Charlie shrugged and waved his hand airily as the porter opened the door, stepping with a casual entitlement that I did not feel into the marble- and gilt-encrusted lobby of his building. He nodded absently in the general direction of the front desk and made his way around the large statues that looked to me as though they had probably been in vogue five or six years previously, and beneath the worryingly bottom-heavy chandeliers, until he had reached the elevator bank. Trailing behind him I attempted to fend off the advances of numerous bellhops – and why were there bellhops, I wondered, in an apartment building, even one like this – and tried to keep myself from staring at the ceilings, which seemed arched almost to the point of arrogance, needlessly tall. I was reminded, suddenly and strongly, of the building my father had worked in when he had still worked in the city, a tall and flashing thing with golden deco designs on the inside that I had solemnly and after much crane-necked contemplation named ‘the building with the ceiling way up high.’ The elevator operator murmured something polite to Charlie as he entered and gave me a look of pity as I caught up, holding my suitcase protectively in front of me. 27

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Charlie and his mother lived on the twelfth floor, the entire twelfth floor, and I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised that the elevator opened directly into their foyer but I was surprised by it, startled by the long muted mirrors along the walls and the garish pieces of art displayed prominently in front of them. They seemed garish to me, anyway, but I didn’t know anything about modern art so I imagined there must have been something about them that I was missing. I made sure not to get too close to any of them. I liked the windows at the end of the hall better than any of the decorations; they were wide and looked out on the trees of the Park, still today in the stagnancy and humidity of summer. “Well, old boy,” he asked, “what do you think?” “I think you’re going to get annoying even to yourself sometime soon,” I said honestly, and he snorted in a way that was entirely unaffected, and I let myself smile a little. The guest bedroom (or was it bedrooms?), he told me, was on the North Wing of the apartment – I deliberately said nothing about the absurdity of designating wings in an apartment, even a large one – which was closer to where his mother slept than to where he did. As a general precaution he advised me to stay in bed until at least ten in the morning and to avoid the large kitchen and dining room on the same hallway. “I,” he said, “have got a more manageable space over here, and she only uses it in the evenings if she needs a drink before the cook is finished with the meal. You’ll have to have that, by the way, with us in the big dining room, which I can assure you will be positively nightmarish if it’s only half as bad for you as it is for me, but at least Marcia makes a truly fine steak. Other than that I generally try to stay out of her way – Mother’s – which is easy during the week when she’s off doing

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whatever it is that she does, and is rather more trying on Sundays when she simply never leaves.” I had only seen his mother once before, at the end of the year; she had seemed vivacious even from a distance, red and robust and fear-inspiring despite the hints of silver threaded through her hair. She had come to take Charlie home, which I remembered finding strange since he lived so close, and the two of them had disappeared into a cab without a word nearly the moment after she had arrived, leaving me stranded and feeling strangely, momentarily bereft. “In any event,” he said, “she’ll probably try to grill you about what we did all year. Just talk about books, or whatever it is you English majors do.” “What did you do last year except read books?” I asked. “Anyway, I haven’t decided whether to be an English major yet,” I reminded him, and he sniffed. “Really, Merritt, we all know you’re going to spend another three years reading Shakespeare and Chaucer and Byron and come out of school with no job-applicable skills whatsoever and wind up trying to teach – oh, I don’t know, repressed schoolchildren about Shelley or something equally repulsive.” “And you’ll be off trying to convince somebody that all of your classes in impenetrable political theory make you a desirable hire,” I said, mildly because I had sensed a kind of fondness buried beneath all of his disdain, and also because both of us knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble getting a job in whatever field I chose with a degree from Columbia, and that he wasn’t going to have to work a single day in his whole goddamn life.

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“All far in the future, old boy,” he said amiably, “far in the future.” “Charlie?” a commanding woman’s voice echoed from the hall. “Where have you gotten to?” He flinched, reflexively. It was not until the fourth day of my visit — only after I had spent three nights in a bed that was far too soft for me in a room that was far more luxurious than anything I had ever seen before, only after three long nights spent watching flickering headlights pass like ghosts along the walls and slowly becoming reacquainted with the pulsing sounds of the city, only then — that Charlie’s mother cornered me in the small kitchen on Charlie’s half (what I had taken to calling Charlie’s half, in my head) of the apartment. He had been right, of course; he was always right: I had gotten up earlier than ten and she had descended. I have over the course of my acquaintance with Charlie Sutherland tried very hard to maintain my own opinions about things. It’s easy to get taken in by people like Charlie, easy to get everything in your head jumbled and confused and easy to convince yourself that your thoughts are your own and not his. I’ve seen Charlie do that to people, and I’ve tried to make sure that he doesn’t do it to me. But I really do think, all on my own, that he was right on about his mother. I had always been awkward with women, old women and young women and anything in-between. Charlie’s mother was no different, except that she was even more difficult for me to handle; she had an almost brutish, animalistic quality that seemed to me to lie solely in the projection of her sex, and she was of such hardy stock that I doubted her age would overtake her for another decade if not more. She needed this; she was in a unique position:

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a woman alone in the world, who should have been out of her depth but who somehow, against all logic, held her own against her male contemporaries. Maybe this trick worked on them, I do not know; it made me feel queasy and out-of-place, and all I wanted the instant she walked in the door was for her to walk back through it, away from me. “Merritt,” she said calmly, and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Good morning, Mrs. Sutherland,” I said politely, and turned back to the newspaper. “You know Charlie never talks about any of you when he talks about school,” she said without preamble, “only about his studies.” “Well,” I said. “I guess – studies are important, aren’t they?” “Yes, they are,” she said, regarding me with what seemed to be mild amusement. “Or, I should say, they are for most people. They are not for Charlie.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean,” she replied, as if explaining something simple to a particularly slow child, “that Charlie has spent the entirety of his life doing very little but accumulating knowledge, and could probably teach all of your professors up there at Columbia something himself. I am not saying this just because he is my son. You have to have noticed that he hardly needs to exert himself to do well in his classes.” “We don’t talk much about our grades, ma’am,” I said evasively, because everything that she had said was essentially true. “Of course you don’t,” she said. “What I would like you to tell me, Merritt, what I

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would appreciate if you told me, is what Charlie does with the rest of his time. With, say, you.” “Oh,” I lied, “just about what everybody else does, I think.” “And that would be?” she asked drily. “Nothing very interesting,” I said stiffly, and hoped that the sweat trickling along the edges of my brow wasn’t noticeable as I returned my blank gaze stubbornly to the paper until she eventually left the room, smiling almost viciously. Then I shivered. she eventually left the room, smiling almost viciously. Then I shivered.

Charlie found me later, brooding over the news section of the Times but not reading it. I wanted a cigarette. I had had to quit since I had left school in May; my mother hated the smell. I would start up again in the fall, I knew, but I had told myself not to get back in the habit on this trip, which would last just a week. It would only make the rest of the summer worse. “You want a smoke,” he said from the doorway, leaning against the frame. “And my mother’s gotten to you.” “Yes,” I admitted. “And – yes.” “I told you,” he told me, without venom. “I told you.” “Yes,” I said again. “It’s all right,” he said, almost kindly, except that Charlie was never kind. “I didn’t – tell her anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I told him over

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my shoulder. “I know,” he said calmly. “You don’t usually tell anybody much of anything.” And even though it was true and had not been meant as an insult I flushed and curled my hands into fists underneath the table. That night I found myself suddenly awake, blinking blearily against the darkness, and became aware of the quiet, breathing presence of someone next to the bed. Charlie was sitting there looking at me, with his legs crossed at the knees and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “Here,” he said, passing me a carton of cigarettes. “Thanks,” I mumbled, propping myself up to take them. “Come on,” he said, any trace of an affectation long gone, “I know you hate to smoke inside.” So we left my room, padding across the paneled wood floor of the foyer and into a dusty, unused room past Charlie’s on the other side of the apartment that had one large window that slid easily open to reveal a spindly black fire escape. “Go on, then,” Charlie said, holding the curtain aside. Heights did not bother me, and I crossed my legs comfortably against the bars. Charlie came after, carefully closing the window behind him. “You know I’m sorry,” he said abruptly after a few moments of relative silence. “For this whole thing. It doesn’t – I can’t be here. I mean I can’t be here. And I thought – but it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry you’re stuck here for the week.”

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It was not the type of thing that Charlie was prone to saying. I studied him for a moment, all young and angry and miserable, and leaned over on an impulse and pressed my nose and forehead against the space beneath his jawbone for a moment and he slid his arm around my neck, hand dangling down in front of me, our sides collapsed together. “I haven’t got anything to smoke these with,” I murmured, looking out at the flickering lights of the city, visible even from this darkened alley. “Shit,” he whispered. “Sorry.” “S’okay,” I told him. He curled his hand in my sleeve for a moment before moving it into my hair, gripping hard and pressing his dry lips against my temple and I knew, or at least I told myself, that this was his way of telling me that he had missed me. He could never have said it. “What do you think it was like,” he asked after a while, “the city, back when we were young? I don’t remember anything, just this apartment and the one before it… my mother never took me anywhere. Not that I would have wanted to be anywhere except New York. “You know, the clubs, the jazz, silent films and everything… back before the crash happened and everybody had so much to worry about all the time. Sometimes I wonder about it. Whether I would have liked it more.” I thought about this for a moment, sitting on the fire escape of the Sutherland Fifth Avenue penthouse with Charlie pressed against me, about people starving in the Dust Bowl and my parents in their small suburban house in Connecticut with the grass cut so evenly by my father every Saturday. “You would’ve hated it,” I said finally. It hardly sounded like

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my own voice; it was detached from my limber, warm-limbed body pressed up against his. “You… you know yourself, Charlie, you thrive on everybody being miserable and tense and worse off than you are, and you like having something to rail against. Even if you think you’d like the world to be different – even if you really do wish that that were true – I don’t think you… want it, really.” He became very still as I spoke. Later somebody would ask me why I had come back to him, back to the strange creature that he had grown into in my absence, after I had been away for so many long years of war. I was sure that he had had other men, in the intervening time; Charlie’s was not a character concerned with anybody but himself. I saw myself, really, as nothing but a convenience to him. I would tell her, the woman who asked, that he was the only thing I had had to get back to, and it would be the truth but it would also be a lie; because really I was just in love with him, and had been since I was eighteen years old and caught him shamelessly scrutinizing me from across the room at a first-year social event at our college, where the liquor and the smoke were flowing freely. That was before Charlie stopped drinking, and he was pink and flushed and scrawny beneath his blue jacket and he nodded at me deliberately and smirked. And I think it was true then, what I said; it was true because I knew it and because if it hadn’t been then Charlie would have gotten up and left, snarling something foul-mouthed, but instead he just sat next to me, trembling, and said nothing. “It’s okay,” I whispered to him, into his neck, as cars blared by and a dog howled streets away. “I don’t mind.” I didn’t. It didn’t matter. I don’t know if it’s true anymore. War does that to people; it grabs them and mash-

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es them up like clay until you can barely even recognize them as they were before. Sometimes whatever it is that is left inside of me simply aches for him as he was when we were still teenagers: haughty Charlie who didn’t give a shit about anybody and who was still trying on personalities and mannerisms to see which one fit him best. The world was still opening up for him then; for me, too. He’s not like that now. He’s still as arrogant as sin, of course. He’s just grown up tired. He’s grown up so, so tired. Instead I think back fondly to those yellow, crumbling memories like the one on the fire escape the following morning (how we didn’t say anything else to each other that night but fell asleep out there on the fire escape, and were awoken by sharp rays of sunlight coming over the roof of the next building and pigeons picking at Charlie’s straw-colored hair until he started and swore violently at them and almost fell to his death – but didn’t – so we laughed – laughed and laughed about it for what felt like hours), cling to them, the last fragile dreams of innocence that I have left.

Forsyth Street from Underneath the Manhattan Bridge by Yuan Yuan

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THe Revolution Ate Me Whole Madeline Smith The revolution ate me whole and gave me an apple so that I could eat, too. So I chewed my apple as he chewed me raw, but still warm with lifeblood and white blood and I wished that he had used a tenderizer. One day, I’m sure, the revolution will eat me in two pieces: head first, so that I can see where we’re headed. My head will go down easily, kindly pre-beheaded, but my body might take quite a while to pass. I won’t mind. I’ll have plenty of time.

They blooded the troops on me, those damn revolutionaries. Darts like voices joyless in my ears and bullet holes in my back like newborn stars dripped white light like chalk on the sidewalk. But I didn’t mind. I don’t have much else to do.

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To my surprise, I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t die the day the revolution ate me whole but made a new home right there in his belly. You see, the wetness of stomach walls is kind of nice. Rib bones make better backrests than flat grass and the movement of the inside of his skin as he breathes and swallows and absorbs his food reminds of life and it suits me. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never been all that hard to please.

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Amsterdam Avenue 1949 Patricia Hickerson — BC ‘49 neighborhood watch: you on the curb of dirt-scabbed streets crumbled, streaked mold this into unborn eyes steps of a divine cathedral scaffolding where Uncle Bob fell as a kid scarred his chin for life scratch ‘what is love’ on the wooden john door count dark bricks bedded in concrete your body swollen with flower seeded, now about to burst sway in elevators, corridors grout-grimed sniff cabbage and onions balance the tilt of dumbwaiters at the door Harold buttons up his fly drop into mouse holes rotten egg—run for your life calculate Pinky the bookie 40

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Nat races slips of paper into canopied candy stores, dig this into your past finger the cockroach trail along the mirror behind Doc Zipper’s soda fountain (belly drop that morning was your heart big enough to hold it all?) count the hours night and day among the garbage pails short walk to the hospital you were born there, too, weren’t you? didn’t Daddy call you ‘Sprout’? single weed bends from a sidewalk crack Ruth types the words cigarettes smoke her crowded corner at the window Columbia rears monstrous the lion greedy in its den, trucks and buses rumble dirt scabs patched up, perfect bloom of a baby new decade sprouting—she mewls in the night 41

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