Beaver Moon

This is just to say

that I do not want to live in a country where a woman is shot dead because she shows up to clean the wrong house.

So many awful things have happened here – are still happening – and this is the one that catches

my lungs on a nail?

There isn't enough caution tape in the world to cordon off this place from itself.

(The well-meaning tell me not to read the news.)

*

The day after the election, between lunch with one friend and happy hour with another, I bop around Manhattan, from Rock Center to Columbia.

There's a moment when you're walking north on Sixth Avenue, all you see are trees and sky. It feels like the city ends there. You know it's Central Park and you know the city continues beyond the Park, this is just a trick of the eye, the hill, etc., but it gets you every time.

All along 59th Street, the doormen say nothing about the rich scent of horse manure. Are they used to it?

If they hold the door for a man wearing pizza socks, does it give them any pause, any joy, any jolt?

I get drunk on fresh bike lane paint, did Rousseau dream of this green?

I careen between green, and blue, and back again. I am different, hour to hour. My mind sometimes as compressed as particle board, and sometimes as supple as the body of a cat.

I dream I am supposed to return to Russia for another year, but Russia is in space, I would have to fly a rocket – and this time I say no.

(As Mamdani said: "Without the night shift there is no morning.")

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