From our beginning we've been joined, eager to take up the same space, breathe the same air. In our mother, we acted as one. We were almost born stacked, though that couldn't be. Instead we felt a moment of brief separation, a fissure. When the doctor plucked me from my mother, I reached out for my sister. I had never felt alone.
Read MoreThere were four men on that train in 1865,
and all the other passengers just belongings
and the baggage of stranger souls. A Wednesday
evening. No fog. The signal given as the bridge
divided and the sloop went past.
Read MoreElizabeth L. Bradley has contributed to Underwater New York, Salon, Smithsonian.com, and Gothamist. "Water" is excerpted from her new history, "New York," by permission of Reaktion Books, London, England (please note Anglicized spelling throughout). "New York" is available for purchase here.
Read MoreAll these white people with blankets and bottles of wine and bits of cheese were camped out along the river to see the tall ships. It was hot as fuck, New York summer wet, with the stink of garbage and something worse, something I don't have a name for.
Read MoreThe man took off his white t-shirt, then removed what looked like a gold chain from around his neck. Balancing on one leg, then the other, he pulled off his white sneakers and lined them up on the wooden boardwalk. Lastly, he laid aside his cell phone, on which he had just been talking, vaulted over the railing, and jumped. We heard the thud of his body hitting the water and the shouts that followed. No one looked prepared to jump in, but everyone had their phones out, ready to call 911. If the police had cared to ask, I would’ve said he was in his thirties, black, thin and wiry, and here the semi-certainties would have ended.
Read MoreLiberty was not delivered to us in an envelope
she was shipped from grayer pastures and I
breathed life into you in a new land
I brought you here and into her arms
and I am awash of postcards and trapped lightning
I am scabbed over from the coins tossed into me
my currents were made for larger bodies
It was striper season in the early nineties
on the eastern bank of the Hudson River,
just south of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge.
My dad, bareback-sloshed with beer and sun,
had his deep-sea pole cast for food. To him
no matter were the toxicity warnings
on most fish north of the Tappan Zee.
Read MoreThe evening skyline in late August looks cold from the High Line, but it’s 75 degrees with humidity. People are up here with me—the 22-year-old west coast naïf—but I’m the only one around watching the black sky and blacker water. A loud someone takes a photo to my right and the flash lingers, icy and white, when they walk away. I stand at the railing, pretending to look native, despite my backpack, and not clueless, despite the Google map I’ve got queued up on the phone in my pocket. I’m short a dad double-fisting a hot dog and a Big Bus brochure—which is my actual dad right now in our Times Square hotel.
Read MoreNo one thought much of it when the garbage men went on strike. They had a list of twenty demands pinned to every signpost and streetlamp. Later I would learn that it was a city-wide effort, but at the time, I thought it was only local. One demand was bolded and italicized: We prefer to be called waste collectors.
Read More
Through observation and speculation I test the world and its workings. What is of paramount interest to me is its nature at the most base level. How circumstances arise.
Read MoreWhen the rain starts, we don’t know each other’s names. We share a line on our address and assume that is all. We are an actor in 1J, a doctor in 3C, law school students in the large unit on the fifth floor. We’ve left dark pockets of tiny towns in the Midwest, the Deep South, the West Coast to emerge in this city. We thought we’d like to join its sprawling crowds.
Read More
All hurricanes are cubist: something seeing, something being
seen. A Picasso eye, splitting the world apart.
It seems they don't look at the ocean here,
have maybe gotten used to the smell of brine
as it wafts over gasoline and fried things
and the rumble of the shuttle,
the tired meandering of silver
against the blue of the sky,
of the sea.
Read More
When Hurricane Sandy struck, my childhood home in the Rockaways was hit. Left in charge to clean it up, I experienced an overwhelming torrent of emotion. The storm not only ravaged our homes and belongings, it turned our guts inside out too.
Read MorePersonal narratives reveal the minutiae of an event so epic in scale it escapes understanding. So it is here with the recollections of Sally and John: an artist and his muse. On May 3rd of 2013, they recounted their mutual affection and shared struggles with gentle ribbing and creative interplay.
Read More1. The Dry
(thinking about Lucretius)
When I tried to count the rings the next day
I estimated one hundred years.
Numbers create order, and I sought precision:
40 feet tall
60 inches around at my chest’s height
20 inches in diameter.
Read MoreMy parents live in a small house on a narrow sliver of land that faces the rocky shore of the Long Island Sound and backs up to a marsh, home to swans, egrets, sandpipers and plovers.