1. My first city is Boston. A four-year-old squiggling at Fenway Park, I got a free tiny
t-shirt, a red sock over the skin of my heart: allegiance beyond reason though I do not
care for baseball.
2. I lived in Los Angeles for nine years and I liked it. A kind place to become a young artist,
it gave me forward rushing in a car at night with the radio on: a communal privacy, creative
down time.
3. I am critical of capitalism especially the kind that makes it perfectly reasonable that all the
shrinks leave in August.
4. The people who consider themselves New Yorkers and love the city are the minority.
There are far more people who live here and hate it. But no one ever imagines
a. all the immigrants making money to send home but long for their culture
b. all the creative misfits whose day jobs allow no time for art
c. all the mothers who pray their children aren't swallowed by the world
Trade Center Bound E Train the automated lady announces, as if it still exists. She says
world like whorl, emphasis between the O and the R, a verbal thumbprint. The subway is
the place I go to the most, other than my home or job. All this time I have been bound
for a place that no longer exists, narrated by no one. Living in the negative space, where
history has already been lived, we are complicit in a name that we don't want to die, to
save a place that hurt us.
There is excitement in suspicion, a pain in not knowing the truth. Belonging,
I do not belong, as everyone.
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