by Jane Doe

Liberty Enlightening the World, 1884, Root & Tinker (Library of Congress)

At approximately 4:36pm, the lights went out in the New Colossus Supermarket. My shift had started at 4:30, and I had the pleasure of training the new girl, Rochelle, on her first day as a cashier. The power outage came on gradually, first appearing in the form of a broken credit card machine. Two or three swipes and nothing happened, not even a blinking light. A few moments later the lights flickered on and off, followed by every other register crashing and half of the ceiling lights turning off. All of these were sure signs that the generators had kicked in.

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by Samantha Neugebauer

"Thisbe" circa 1900. Detroit Photographic Company. Library of Congress.

Man-Men

Her vestibule of memory,
is the slippery port of call,
where the doberman bark against
the proselytized metallic salts
and sing the failure of Hart’s Line to
entice the

frank breeched man–
short coated and noble–
who cripples the pearly wide
butterfly of her female pelvis,
yet fails to deaden the sobbing
lips which whimper to her midwives
Please Make the boy turn.

Inside her head,
black and lean with pry bar voices,
the dogs echo their woman handler’s command
Come Come Come
but the message’s gooseneck design,
always finishes in the birthplace painfully.

And it is the same as Gaia,
who created both
her equal
and the sickle who gelded him,
her vestibule of memory is both
producer and consumer,
rabid and loyal,
wimpling without prayer,
as the self-inventions turn to a
Bedlam where the woman
pretends in fetal position while waiting for the
man to dock the dogs.

—

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by Chris Conroy

Starlight Park, the Bronx, circa 1921. G.G. Bain Collection

Thanks to all those high school missions into the Bronx for weed, I find Crescent Ave in a snap. Clockers are leaning up the huge rusted gates that surround what I guess are the basketball courts; to my right, directly across from the gates, is number 612. I circle the block a few times in hopes of finding a parking spot, but all I really do is stir up the dealers, so I double park Mike’s Jeep in front of 612. To play it safe, I secure the club and hit the hazards, but before I’m halfway out the door I’m confronted.

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by Ben Nardolilli

Times Square, 1943. John Vachon. Office of War Information.

This rain, is it even
Rain? This rain is water
Hanging itself, precipitation
Suicide, a survey, a taste,
The perfume of the clouds,
This rain is not heavy,
Like gnats and flies,
Wet swarming, a dark
Bag of diamonds, a confusion
For the meteorologists,
What to call this weather,
What icon to slide it by,
What are the weatherpeople
Supposed to say? This rain unable
To even give Noah a slight case
Of post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Scrubbing Bubbles. 2009, 24” x 28”, oil on canvas.

“The themes I explore in my paintings, commodities and currency, serve as social connectors, embodying universal qualities. I create totemic images that reveal the fetishizing nature of capitalist economies. My work battles the hegemony of the commodity, and the economic order that has made this state of affairs possible.”

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by Peycho Kanev

Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928

I can’t see anything but wasted faces,
broken bodies, tired souls and as I walk
in the morning to my job
the streets seem full of ghosts.
oh these factories sucking slowly our lives
away and all those guillotine-jobs killing our
precious time.

I am ready to start my live all over again but
on what price?
who’s going to fight for me this time?
I’ve lost all my battles against the existence
against all the factory owners
against all odds.

and later in my room
I turn on the TV and they show me how to become
A millionaire,
easy.

I turn it off
and lay in the bed and I know
that all our heroes have been wrong:

the dark is empty.

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