After The Interview...Ll Poem by Morgan Michaels

'E-mail', he growled, 'is surely responsible'.

It was as though the word 'lease' was a foreign concept, unknown to area shop keeps. Used to the rigors of Carnegie Hill, he relaxed into the relatively Carnaby-esque atmosphere of the neighborhood, guessing that at least here there was no danger of restaurants leaving town. High rents can kill a city, he mused, or drastically undercut its diversity. It's happened before. There ought to be a law.

On 14th Street he turned west. The hardy locust trees planted decades before had matured. They reached out and touched each other sideways and made a broken arcade of shade for pedestrians along the block, ceding down pods and other leafy offal like rejected playing cards spoiling an otherwise workable hand. And many pedestrians there were- workers clad in T-shirts against the baking heat, men and women in business attire, hurrying out to grab a quick lunch of pizza or bean sprouts, and even a wall-eyed escapee from Manhattan Eye And Ear in a billowy hospital gown, pushing his IV pole across Second. Completing the picture, a shirtless man in skin-tight jeans, sixty-ish, with sun-beaten skin and white hair drawn back in a pony tail, threaded his way easily through the idling traffic toward the park. It was like old times.