by John Grey

Lower East Side, 2004, Moncrief

The Window

Without the window,
there’s no outside,
no tenement across the street,
no traffic below.
No pane of glass
opening up the outside
and it’d be just the two of us
in the early morning
huddled together
under sheets and blankets
in this birdcage sized apartment.
If I couldn’t get up
and see what else there is
I’d think that nothing existed
that wasn’t you.
I watch people going about their business
and soon enough it’s my business.
They look up, down or across at me
and I am in their lives.
You join me
and your eyes too
make their way out into the world.
It’s daylight and we’ll never
be this close, this in love,
this caught up in each other,
ever again.
We’re on the same side of the window
but it’s still between us.

—

John Grey is an Australian-born poet and a U.S. resident since the seventies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alimentum, Big Muddy, Connecticut Review, The Georgetown Review, Kestrel, The Pinch, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere.

by Stephen Jarrell Williams

Pittsburgh, 1940, Jack Delano, Library of Congress

LABORING

Poor men
working
the streets,

their silence
singing
like gods
under a hidden sky.

—

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Flora and Fauna, 2010

“Life can be a complicated journey, and sometimes can have a paradoxical component to it. Art, having an emotional and intellectual dimension, will have an impact on the viewer.”

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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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