L . Sze
Honey moon
Seward Park High School’s line is not for vaccines at all but a bread line! Common starlings abound on the Lower East Side! Here a chunk of bread, there some spilled rice from a takeout container. Walk and walk and walk and find only abundance today. Despite the bitter wind, the sun made my two winter coats feel excessive. The starling picks at this, at that, the wind, paint chipping off the Williamsburg, at Cuenca’s outskirts the hummingbird was a whir, the smallest bird in the world I learned today from my kid’s virtual kindergarten class. Then it wasn’t lost, our power, our vantage point, we were near a waterfall: broad, porous, a container into the rainforest canopy that stretched as far as the prison ships will go. To be with you is to be held forever in this photograph: sweaty, smiling broadly, the years ahead of us, waterfall behind. All the wet noise of the forest contained in this frame.
Goodbye Poem
Of course it is: my taste for sweet red bean, that I crowd around to buy sprigs of berry and quince blossoms in February, to cut out the unnecessary English in transactions (each 2 dollar). Of course it is: to trace migratory routes up the coast, through the spine, toward the east, out west, to the groves and orchards, off ships and Pan Am and Delta into tenements or wide open spaces or cul-de-sacs, off hand-trucks and delivery fleets, to the science of the cherry and the orange, to the farms and the work, to recency and relevance, to the taste of [...]
The navel orange, the russet potato, bok choy, water spinach. It was a market, you made the most of it: June 29, 1973.
Revelations at the end of the world
q: how is your homework going?
a: i looked it up and the word verb is a noun!
verbing
reverb
verbum
the word, in the beginning, etc
q: how much cash should we have at hand at any given moment in case?
a: in case what?
q (continued): in case banking systems collapse, you know, apocalypse?
a (continued): having a few more bills won’t help you in that situation
i remember shaking from watching will smith in i am legend, had to leave,
couldn’t even watch it happen from the comfort of the plush seat
first your loved ones begin to die—
then covid kills (michael our agreeable contractor who looked abashed while smoking)
and kills (our elegant bespectacled mailman whose name i forget)
and kills (actually everyday from our window we watched the body bags on the gurneys go to the funeral parlors in nyc, spring 2020)
mommy dies and i learn how excruciating cancer can be—
then two summers ago the orange sky
a strange martian smog
smoke from canada
earthquakes floods, later wildfires, LA burning
q: why was the weather so weird in 2024?
clarifying q: besides climate change?
q: is this the end of the world?
a: it may feel like it sometimes, customs and kindness unspooling like wrapping paper,
enough to appear on the roll, just short of enough to wrap any gift
but the gift of the earth
but the gift of the child asking the question
but the gift of common sense and humor
the gift of being here and tomorrow—
the great gutsy fact of our bodies alive in manhattan surviving—
and, for now, that’s not nothing
L. Sze is a writer and cultural worker from New York City.
