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Child as Parent
by Greg Gerke 11/17/2019Neighborhood: Park Slope
Isn’t it fitting to think of Wordsworth when raising a baby? “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”—best to cut the poem there. He authored so many other polished pieces about childhood and how the mind changes when growing up and old, crowned by the great koan-like first line of The Immortality Ode, “The child is […]
Roommates
by Don MacLaren 10/19/2019Neighborhood: Astoria, Corona, Crown Heights, Ground Zero, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen
I’ve spent time in over 20 countries and at least 40 US states. In my travels, many people have told me that though New York City might be a nice place to visit, it’s certainly not a place for a person to live. But thank God there is a New York. One of the best […]
Learning to Drive
by Lily Lopate 10/13/2019Neighborhood: Cobble Hill, Flushing
I am learning to drive for the second time. On Sundays, I take classes at “Learn-Rite,” a school in Flushing. The school boasts a neon blue sign illustrating a yellow car and red stop sign. The graphics’ cheap branding displays cartoon-like pictures as if to reassure students that this endeavor is simple, achievable, and above […]
A Sports Coat is Worth a Thousand Words
by JB McGeever 08/18/2019Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Jamaica, Long Island
My dad reached inside the closet for his new jacket, single breasted, two button, and straight off the rack. It was pencil gray with flecks of black in it and may have had those professorial looking patches on the sleeves, but I’m not sure. He didn’t care much about clothes and the jacket was nothing […]
Settling
by Abby Hofstetter 08/11/2019Neighborhood: Long Island, Queens, The Catskills
I broke up with my first boyfriend one month, two weeks, and four days after I found out he was fucking his neighbor. I never told him that I’d overheard them. He never wanted to fight; he didn’t want us to be the couple who fought. It was important to him that we maintain a […]
The Darkroom
by Rachel Cline 06/30/2019Neighborhood: Clinton Hill, Midwood
I learned to write in seventh grade. Not to form sentences, but to know and use my voice on paper, and to hope I would be heard. It was 1969: Nixon was president and I had a new teacher: a 26-year-old draft evader named Robert Rusch. He was six feet four and, moreover, wore cowboy […]
Keith Haring in the Brooklyn Museum
by Dan Hubbs 05/05/2019Neighborhood: Brooklyn
I used to like Keith Haring’s stuff When you’d see It on the subway You’d look out The window as The train pulled In and see A space ship With a beam Of light on a Baby or A dog or Something And you’d smile Or see the ones with the Big muscle guy With […]
Old Lefties: An Oral History
by Paul Buhle 04/21/2019Neighborhood: Brighton Beach, Co-op City, Lower East Side, Ozone Park
Editor’s Note — These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old […]
The Ohio Convention
by John Reidy 03/03/2019Neighborhood: Greenpoint, Port Authority, Woodside
I ran into Dad’s room after hearing my name called. “Take off your shoes,“ he said. I wondered what the heck was going to happen now. That morning my mom had told me that I would be going to Akron, Ohio with Dad to see the people who caused his nightmares and screaming. His war […]
Naked City
by Clifford Thompson 02/10/2019Neighborhood: Central Park, Cypress Hills, Manhattan
For a time in the late 1980s, a local TV station in New York City aired late-night reruns of Naked City. The show, a black-and-white police drama set in New York, had originally aired from 1958 to 1963, the year of my birth. Those years were a critical period in the civil rights movement, and, […]
Car Pool, 1994
by Amy Rigby 02/03/2019Neighborhood: Lower East Side, Williamsburg
Got to pick these kids up. Oh why did we start a stupid car pool? Maybe car pools made sense in the suburbs of 1972 but…in Williamsburg, 1994? Still, it beats trying to get four five year-olds from Brooklyn to Avenue D in Manhattan by subway and bus. One big problem is our car. I […]
What the World Can Do
by Steven Goldleaf 12/02/2018Neighborhood: Coney Island, East Village
In the summer of 1973, my younger brother and I shared a basement apartment on East 12th Street in Brooklyn off Avenue J, a nice middle-class sort of area. We had lost our parents to cancer and a stroke, ten months apart, a few years before this, when he was fourteen and I was sixteen. […]