Alexandra Reiss

The subway comes above ground on 96th street, where men’s jockey shorts cling damply to the curb, defying dignity, where beer-battered boxes, cardboard constructions, stink outside on sidewalks: houses in front of houses.
Here, immigrants rush to fill the cracks of the rickety pre-war brownstones with memories of the old country and the smell of ethnic food. Who, here, remembers the Cotton Club? These houses, now just relics. Skeletons, of some brown-and-out bebop heyday.
On the corner a shopping cart doubles as a spit, and a man with plastic bags over bare feet, roasts a pigeon on a wire coat hanger. He hands out scraps of meat to a convoy of similar carts and rickshaws. Bits of bird are accepted as sacraments. Here, where church is held on the sidewalk and where bread exists
only as an abstract notion- unattainable, like money to pay the rent.
...

Timepiece
Congratulations watch-wearers!
You are cuffed
to an illusion.
...

It's not even a cute baby—
No cherubic redeeming qualities,
Just drool, set on course through
Gummy gap-toothed no return.
...

Creases brown and dirty, like a map-
creases caked with dirt, silt in tiny rivers.
Sweat compelled the dust on my palms
to form this geography.
...

I wonder what will finally get me in the end: the booze or the cold tablets.
Red-eyed awake: I contemplate the man.
You say he keeps you down. Really,
he keeps you up, swearing sweaty in the middle of the night.
...

You crept up slowly, until I could not remember a time when you had not been there. And you told me you loved me and you told me to stay. But you were a liar. You fed on my decay until your cheeks grew fat and full.
...

I was conceived in the Gazpacho room.

I cannot decide if it is beautiful or disgusting or both at once, that I know this. I’ll let it be beautiful. The Gazpacho room can still be visited today, free to visitors, spirit seekers, pilgrims, or to anyone wandering down Moses Lane in the town of Southampton. Note the customary cast-iron jockeys that greet you with brass ring in outstretched hand: a hitching post— as if you would be arriving by horse.
If you did come to the house, third down the road, with the pool where brother nearly drowned, you would see the tree in the back, with wooden boards nailed to it that we called a fort. The tree devour the boards slowly—their disappearance coinciding with our waning interest in tree forts. If you came to the house, the house where I met my first friend, spent my first hurricane, lost my last tooth— if you walk by that house, third down on Moses Lane, where my family used to group-share summer places and god-knows what else, look up to the second floor, middle window, right above the stairs.
...

I lean outside my window
the window at my parents' house,
on the 14th floor facing the service alley.
I feel at home for the first time in ages. But
...

Learned ignorance -
Not a proposition. A skill.
Honed, practiced.
Internalized and naturalized, until
...

Scholar of
conflicted thought processing-
a joke
that doesn't even garner
...

Born from song—
Streets as uneasy as your ancient stones.
Many holy men have walked these streets—
And now?
...

...

You used to have a parakeet—
Only, you- called it a lovebird.

You named her Philly. Actually, her name was something exponentially more ridiculous, though I will not grant you the satisfaction you might feel if you were to perhaps come across this piece of writing later, reading in print the full name of your lovebird and my speculative childhood antagonist.
...

I have been to MR. WEITZMAN’S approx.37 times.
I have seen MR. WEITZMAN approx. once.
Well, once and ½
If you count the time I caught a glimpse of him
...

...

Yesterday, I would not have stepped into this teashop
But you wrapped me in your air of tobacco and tea leaves, The smell— was it your hair?
Currents and cloves, it still lingers just above my lip; insistent.

...

You went to China to find yourself. And now? Geography separates us in body, in mind. Map spread across my bed sheets: unfolded. Blue, green, alone –- all these roads point to you.

And you are a mountain. And I am proud. But you are a mountain with uneven peaks –- too far away for me to love.
...

I don’t know where the time goes, how many days has it been since I’ve been outside? How long since I’ve left my bed? There are just so many things
that need to be done. That I need to –
Take-out cartons litter what was once the floor. Even if I did get up, I would have to pick my way through the debris, minesweeping on a battlefield. I make this sacrifice only to feed the cat. Vomit. Take an aspirin.
A hundred missed calls on my phone, I don’t even check email. It all seems so –
...

My faults have
settled down
in quiet suburbs.
...