ISSUE 5
Ritual
Just as water has its rituals—tides, waves, temperatures—we often come to its shores with our own. Chester Higgins Jr.’s photograph, MAAFA Rebirth, documents a commemoration of the brutality of the Middle Passage in Coney Island. Maxine Henryson’s project is a daily chronicling of the Hudson River. The repetition and drudgery of Duwand’s factory work in Lashon Daley’s “Duwand Works for Good Humor Inc.” leads to her riotous imaging of how a fleet of ice cream trucks wound up sunken off the Rockaways. Both Said Sayrafiezadeh and George Boorujy tossed messages in bottles into the NYC waterways, but for very different reasons. For Cheryl French, walking along the water is a ritual in itself. Read on to see these stories, poems, photographs, and many more.
A note from the writer: This one came out of a workshop with Lisa Jarnot, who astutely noted that it has the same rhyme and meter as Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." A happy accident.
Brooklyn artist George Boorujy is putting original drawings of pelagic (open ocean) birds in bottles, along with a questionnaire, and launching them into New York waterways as an exploration of our connection to and impact on the ocean and its wildlife, as well as an examination of what we value in our culture – plastic, art, the health of the environment, and by extension, our own health.
thirteenth day
a loom
a rag
a rug
the sky
a skydyed
blue theres
always a ticket
says the man
taking tickets
A bag of lottery tickets submerged in Prospect Park Pond.
Duwand wasn’t the most disgruntled employee at Good Humor, Inc. His position as a Quality Control Inspector at the conveyor belt had its benefits. He was never asked to lift anything like the stock boys who wore back braces, nor was he ever blamed for anything– his supervisor was held responsible for all of his mistakes and those of the other 19 employees just like him.
On the small kitchen table lay a set of objects: a vial of pills that looked prescription but bore no prescription; the scuffed cover of a punk CD of unknown origin; and one of the manuals, the writing on its cardboard cover Sharpie-scrawled and illegible. Like the pills, it had arrived from her mother the previous day. Vera Schiele Obek stood over it all, eyeing the items and wondering what the coming voyage would hold.
Sitting beside the Bronx River with the sun warming my back and a gentle breeze tossing my hair in my face, I hear the whistle and clatter of the trains as they rumble to and from Grand Central. I hear the hum of traffic along the parkway. I hear the high-pitched whir of the HVAC system for the train station. I also hear robins, chickadees, sparrows, and orioles chirping, geese honking, new spring leaves rustling, and water flowing in eddies and currents down the river. This is what I love, and this is why I walk.
1848
Of all us hotel souls, burdened and bound to the Parkers by birth or debt or a blindered need of work, you’re the one the world will fail. Like the headlines you hawked before you landed here – two cents a week, two weeks two weeks too many you said – chance and place will collude to kill you:
The water, even though it’s dirty and tastes like bleach, washes them away. It’s better than a corner; it’s a tank. I’m not writhing against a pole or sitting on someone’s lap. I wear costumes with sequins and chiffon. Sometimes I don’t wear anything at all; that’s when I’m at my best, somersaulting and nosing my way into your wallet.
“Except for waist-bands, forehead-bands, necklets, and armlets, and a conventional pubic tassel, shell, or, in the case of the women, a small apron, the Central Australian native is naked. The pubic tassel is a diminutive structure, about the size of a five-shilling piece, made of a few short strands of fur-strings flattened out into a fan-shape and attached to the pubic hair. As the string, especially at corroboree times, is covered with white kaolin or gypsum, it serves as a decoration rather than a covering. Among the Arunta and Luritcha the women usually wear nothing, but further north, a small apron is made and worn.”
— W. Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, “The Native Tribes of Central Australia,” 1899
My idea for getting married on a boat in the Hudson River was, in theory, a good one. It had come to me in a flash one afternoon at Shelter Island where my fiancée Karen and I had gone to scout out possible venues for our wedding. We were hoping to have a ceremony that was simple and secular, quirky but classy, something that incorporated our abiding love and affection for New York City, and also something that didn’t cost too much. Most of these requirements, however, seemed to have little chance of being satisfied by what we had seen during our six hours on Shelter Island, and it wasn’t until evening, while the two of us sat on the shore, depleted and dejected, imagining the worst possible cookie-cutter wedding, that we happened to observe a sailboat serenely floating past.
This group of photographs was a part of the AIR Gallery summer exhibition, "If These Walls..." on Governor's Island. AIR Gallery and UNY initiated a collaboration where three writers created poems based on a water-inspired work from the exhibition. Poet Katy Lederer worked from Maxine Henryson's "Hudson Everyday"--you can read her poems here.
Cynthia Manick wrote her poem in response to Chester Higgins, Jr.’s photograph, which captures a commemoration on the Coney Island beach of Maafa, the Kiswahili term for the “terrible occurrence” or “great disaster” of the Middle Passage and its ongoing effects. Buy a copy of this broadside here.
They come to me, reeking of desperation, eyes glassy with tears, weak brown like coffee. Señor Gold, they say, can’t you help me?
Can’t you help me get my man to stay?
Can’t you help me find a job?
Can’t you help me make the demons go away? They burrow in my skin like snakes.
Homeboy did everything he was told to do.
He asked which Orisha was the one for iron.
He found out it was the same one for war.
He took this as a sign.
He said some words and danced when nobody was looking.
He found some beads and started wearing them.
He did not make the connection between tricksters and St. Anthony.
He listened to Aguanile, and was really feeling it.
Sleepy Peopl created this artwork for an event in collaboration with Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess. See pictures and read more about it here.