l(AM)ent of New York By Sierra Blanco
It is 1:41 am, dark-o’clock if I bothered to look, and I hate the stars. They taunt me in their beauty, an oblivious display of false superiority, “look, you’d never see this in any city” kind of vibe that makes me wish I didn’t know what they could look like. If the stars shone like this in New York, you wouldn’t need any streetlights in central park. Just look up, there’s a million little flames in the sky. Million little flashlights, billion little trinkets shining silver, like something a magpie might want to steal. We have those too, magpies fly here. They come in the morning with the crows and try to steal the potato chips we leave on the porch after grocery runs because we don’t have enough room in the kitchen to decontaminate everything. The delinquents, these corvids, tend to rip open the bag if I don’t take it in by dawn. That would sound like some kind of gag story, some kind of superiority joke about the problems of suburbia if I was back in Manhattan. I’m not, back that is, and I probably won’t be until God doesn’t care when, but I miss seasons. I miss having to deliberate whether or not I should put away the jacket that makes me look like Eurydice in Hadestown in favor of the puffer that looks like the coats in “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me.” I got tickets to closing night off a crazy girl I met on the bus that one time. I miss telling coffee-shop employees my name is Wyvern just to have them ask how that’s spelled and then follow up with “just put Ivy” and watching them smile in relief, in on the secret of my name without keeping it. Especially that one Starbucks in particular that used to be close to my mom’s job, they actually did manage to figure out how to spell Wyvern, and thought it was my real name for the three years I went there on internship coffee runs.
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