Smells like fall today, good day for shopping. I fill an oyster-shell purse
with one dollar bills and take the 6 train to Chinatown. The children
are bright as melons and their parents look weary from a day of selling
slippers, handbags, and wristwatches. I pass eleven perfume stands,
a bodega of silk kimonos, and a pawn shop before I see her. But when I do,
I am certain she is the one for me, she has the perfection of fruit.

I know when she is older, she will love lemonade, that her hair
will never curl. I scoop her up with one arm and drop the oyster
into her carriage. I walk slow until I reach the corner, then I begin to run.

She doesn’t cry much, and when she does, I kiss her hard, smearing cherry-red
lipstick all over her face and neck. I promise to never make her learn piano
or French, unless she wants to. In ten years, I’ll let her tattoo her hands.
I’ll buy her umbrellas and gold hairpins, and whenever she finally asks me
where it was she came from, I’ll say: You came from an oyster, and you are my pearl.

"Don't ever start a story by talking about the weather," Oscar told me one particularly cold and drizzly day. We were all sitting around in Washington Square Park's mostly empty fountain. We were lizards laying there, the three of us, our bellies turned to the sun, enjoying a sudden break in the storm. There was a patch of slate blue straight above us, but the Village was still ringed by roiling black clouds. At that moment though they were just hanging out, quiet and huge; all rumbly like foreshadowing. "It's just lazy. So cliché."

Oscar was reading the New Yorker I had swiped him from the University library. He pointed his finger at me, its tip sticking out of a hole in his glove. "You better not be writing like that."

At the beginning I had explained to them that I was writing my thesis in clinical social work, but Oscar always insisted on giving me advice like I was a novelist.

"I'll tell you if it's good," Ernest said and reached his wiry black hand across to snatch the magazine. "Let me read it."

"Old man, you can't read," Oscar pulled it to his chest.

Ernest took a pull off his little bottle of bourbon, "I can so read."

"Doesn't mean you would know a good description of weather from a bad one," Oscar explained, he was always explaining, "What are you, a meteorologist?"

"Hell, you know I'm a painter." Ernest said.

As he told it, Ernest was actually Jean-Michel Basquiat in hiding. He'd faked his death because the FBI had been following him. "They were gonna kill me like they did Andy, and John Lennon," he used to recount this to me all the time. To prove his identity he would take a broken piece of chalk from his pocket and sketch out an oval with teeth on any surface nearby. "See," he would say.

When Oscar was done with the magazine he handed it off to Ernest and then sat next to me on the rim of the fountain. We watched all of the city rush by. Since the rain had stopped people were out, hurriedly criss-crossing the park, on their way to other places. But we were happy right there. He would point at people and tell me what he knew about them from their looks. "She wants to make love to me," he pointed at a blonde jogger whose ponytail bounced with her strides. "So does that other one," he whistled at a young mother steering a stroller. She shot him a look.

Oscar winced, "Nope, she's a lesbian."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Well, she doesn't want to sleep with me."

I laughed and then he leaned in close and I could smell him. He pointed at a man in a business suit hoping out of a cab, "He is cheating on his wife."

"How do you know?"

"He is wearing white sneakers which don't go with his suit and overcoat. His dress shoes are back at the office probably. He didn't want to get them all dirty coming out in the rain, doesn't want to have to clean them before he goes home. And he just took off his ring."

"That doesn't mean..."

Then, just like that, our blonde jogger snuck up to him and kissed him hard. Business man wrapped his arms around her, then, thinking better of it, took just her hand and led her back to the cab, which pulled away with them inside.

"Lucky guess," I said.

"Only shallow people don't judge by appearances," Oscar explained to me. "The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible."

*****

The weather was still bad when Halloween rolled in. I was supposed to go to a party in Alphabet City with Sibyl, but I told her to go on ahead and took the A train down to the park. I had bought them a bag of small, individually wrapped candy bars. It was so stormy I thought maybe they had gone to the shelter, but then I heard hollering. Ernest was down on all fours and Oscar was standing up on him, trying to climb the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi. He appeared to be wrapped from head to toe in tin foil.

"Oscar!"

"Guess what I am!" he shouted.

"What are you?"

"I'm a lightning rod!"

It took me a good twenty minutes to talk him down and then I walked them both over to the shelter at 32nd and Park. Oscar insisted on keeping his tin foil on. I gave him the bag of candy and wished them both a happy Halloween.

They stood there on the sidewalk eating the little chocolate bars. Cars shot by in the rain and their headlamps made Oscar's costume spark up like a tiny bolt of lightning.

*****

It was a sudden and hard winter and they spent one too many nights out in the cold. Ernest went to sleep and didn't wake up. I sat with Oscar at the hospital while he cried on me. Then I went home. Sibyl put her arms around me while I cried on her.

My thesis was almost done and I scrounged up the money to get Oscar a bus ticket. He had a daughter in Tuscaloosa, he said.

Before he got on the bus he turned to me, "I guess I'm migratory now. You should put that in your story. How I'm like a wild animal."

"I will."

He laughed a heavy, hard laugh and wiped a tear away. "Here," he said, putting a small, dirty notebook in my hand.

I looked at the sad and weathered little thing, "What is it?"

"My diary. One should always have something sensational to read." He got on the bus and waved as it pulled away.

His diary was the icing on my thesis.

He had done two tours in Vietnam before they booted him out. He had been indiscrete about a dalliance with a Saigon shop keeper. He served some time then found his way home to Harlem, but the nightmares had kept him up, and out of work. Earnest had been a pensioner and that's how they had stayed alive for so long.

I knew then that he didn't have a daughter in Tuscaloosa. He just wanted to end his story with better weather. It made me think of wild Asian elephants disappearing to their secret graveyards in the jungle.

When I got home Sibyl asked me, "How was he when you put him on the bus?"

I smiled just a little, "Wild," I said.

James Bezerra is a too-old creative writing major at CSU Northridge. He has been a journalist, a playwright, and a pet cemetery manager, and among other things he is also a produced screenwriter and a terrible, terrible blogger. 

Here's the story as compiled from the scantest of clues: The writing on the back of a stall door in the restroom of a twenty-four hour restaurant under the Gowanus Expressway. Arturo must be a romantic if he's prompted while doing his business to uncap a pen and make his declaration of love on this pocked metal surface. Not just "love," but this welding together of two souls—a-co-joining meant to outlive time. What does he know at his age? And what age is he, anyway? The handwriting, though legible, bears signs of immaturity—uppercase "R"s incongruous among their lowercase neighbors, which themselves are jagged, uneven, misshaped, even when counting for the writer's haste and awkwardness of position. The sentiment itself: Bold, optimistic and thus naïve, as underscored by the inclusion of the year and intimation of permanence. He was at least fourteen the night he wrote it (it was nighttime, of course), maybe fifteen, and, at the very outside, sixteen. Boys older than that are close enough to being men that they don't bother with such public pronouncements (there are exceptions).

Other inferences: Arturo is right-handed, given the way the message unrolls across the face of the door, a pronounced fall-off from the left to the right, and in fact every character that comes after the "s" of his beloved's name seems like one in a line of lemmings going over a cliff. Arturo is of average height. At the time, he wore his hair closely cropped on the sides, though there might have been a little extra on top, stiff with gel. Denim and tanktops, and the occasional dark-blue Jeter jersey with its virginal number "2" like a brand across his broadening back. Funny with his friends, shy in school, where he causes no trouble, draws scant attention, and simply, adequately, completes the assigned courses of study—information that will leave little lasting impression on him.

Let's surmise, too, he has survived a traumatic event, something perhaps very few of us (thankfully) have had to endure. It is a Thursday night, one night after his eleventh birthday, and he is helping his father at the liquor store. Late summer mist rolls in off the harbor; the Statue of Liberty's torch hangs like a second, nearer moon; foghorns sound. A traffic light on the corner clicks from red to green, green to amber, amber back to red, but no cars move through this desolate intersection. There are few customers—Thursday is always slow—but three men materialize out of those mists, and they are inside the store, nowhere and everywhere at once, and they bind Arturo's wrists and press the bright edge of a knife to his throat. Cursing, shouting—chaos that serves its intended purpose. One of the men kicks the knees out from under his father, who drops to the floor and is pinned there like an insect, two barrels of a shotgun flush against his beating heart.

As we've established, Arturo survives; so does his father. That's all we can say for certain. Who knows, even for all of our other inferences, how the incident shapes him? What provable theorems can we marshal, which axioms or principles can we cite in support of a conclusion? Maybe that he went on to proclaim eternal love for someone is enough.

And what of Lourdes? Best to begin by envisioning her—by hanging some flesh on her bones, so to speak. Shapely brown arms, thighs that lend form to her jeans, a backside that men twice and three times her age stare after but that she never even thinks about—or pretends not to think about. Black hair hanging straight as a curtain to her bare shoulders, straps of her bra visible under a tanktop the color of a lime lollipop. A pendant between her breasts—a crucifix, presented by her godmother (who happens to be her older cousin) on the occasion of her recent confirmation. We'll declare as we can't for Arturo her exact age: Lourdes has in 2005 turned thirteen.

Has she ever been in love? Yes. Well, maybe. The shivers she feels when she sees the young gym teacher straddling the backward-turned chair at the end of the hallway, with his unlaced Adidas and deadly ray of a smile. That's love, isn't it, to go to jelly in the legs when he picks her out from the pack of shuffling ninth-graders to urge her on by name? "You too, Lourdes, you better keep it moving if you don't want to be late to class." Oh, God, isn't that love?

She is smart enough to best most of the girls and all of the boys in her math class, where complex variables and prime roots unthread themselves on the page, yielding their solutions before she can put the point of her pencil to the paper. She is smart enough to set aside the money she earns during her Sunday morning shift at the bakery, where fathers straight from the 9 a.m. at Visitation hand her an extra dollar for their sweetened coffee. She is smart enough to say nothing when they brush her fingers with theirs. She is smart enough, too, to lock herself in her room on the nights her father stays up late playing dominoes and drinking rum with some men who aren't really his friends but who also like to stay up late playing dominoes and drinking rum.

Let's say, because this is the way things sometimes go, that she enjoys the attention of Arturo, but that she does not feel what she feels for the gym teacher. She is not sure what she feels, exactly. There is something about Arturo's smell, about the roughness of his lips on hers... She is the only one of her friends with a boyfriend and there is something to be said for that. But Arturo—well, he's just a boy. Which isn't to say she wants a man yet either. For now she's happy enough to wake up, to work, to enjoy the way her mind untangles math problems, to hear someone say her name in the hallway.

She knows what she doesn't want, though, and we learn it in the words we give her, finally, to toss over her shoulder as she walks away: Don't put that forever shit on me.

Dominic Preziosi attended college at Fordham University and eventually moved to Brooklyn, where he's lived for the past 20 years. His fiction most recently appears or is forthcoming in Avery, Cezanne's Carrot, Front Porch, Menda City and SmokeLong Quarterly.

When Robert met Audrey, his hands didn't shake. Weeks later, he would notice her hands, small and seemingly fragile. He remembered a story that escaped from her. She had told Robert how a lover choked her, how she reciprocated, how they played until an ambulance took him away. She slurred details to Robert: her tenderness for him, his small arms & thin chest, his throat's hard contractions against her palms. She wept softly, then harder.

Robert noticed her small hands, imagined them wrapped around a naked boy's throat, his face paling. A tender past shone from Robert's eye. Audrey felt suddenly warm, and weak. "I'd like you to take me for a drink," she said. "Would you do that?"

"Yes," Robert replied uncertainly. They walked down to a small bar, music low, dark pleasant. He paid for her drink, something he'd never done before. Robert's hands began to shake only after he brought the drinks from the bar to their table. They talked, as people do in the early evening.

David Winter studies creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and escapes to NYC whenever he can. Aside from escaping, he also facilitates a writing workshop for prison inmates through the Right to Write program.

On the twelfth floor, Viv lay in a darkened room, her bed propped up to face a window that looked south over the nighttime city, over what appeared to be thousands of  jeweled boxes thrown together in a heap.

She was little more than the skeleton; the purple splotched legs  that extended from the short white hospital gown were so thin you could have—except for the ugly knot of knee—encircled them with your thumb and forefinger. She was motionless except for the labored breathing; a white plastic tube ran from her nose to a tall green, torpedo-shaped tank beside her bed.

Still, the motionless face was surprisingly well-known: the wide brow and handsome nose; the hair, once golden-red, now white, was still thick, elegantly waving, somehow still glamorous and young.

In the dark room, silhouetted against the lights of the city, a small, dark, wiry man in jeans and a tight black sweater was dancing, holding an imaginary partner at arm's length, his small hands high and delicate.

Viv was propped up watching.

"Hey, Viv," he was saying.  "You stepped on my foot, man.  You got to follow me now, baby. OK, we're dancing, hello. Now, I'm dancing, well, what's your name? You say, well, my name is Viv and I bet you're Eddie.  I heard of you Eddie, you're just about the coolest guy around they say, best dancer in NYC.  Oh yeah, that's me. No point trying to deny it when the truth's the truth, right? Now let's dance."

With his hands held high to lead the imaginary Viv, he took three steps, swiveling his hips with each one, then throwing out his hip on the fourth, eyes serious and straight ahead.  Hands up, he spun her, arms out.

The music was loud, but did not blare—guitar; flute, maybe; a bit of horn.

The song ended and Eddie punched the button on his tape player, took out the tape, and put in another one.

"OK, OK, I know Tango's your dance, really. OK, here we go now."

He held his arms out in front of him and looked ferociously straight ahead.

"Slow slow quick quick slow," Eddie counted.  "Slow I said!  Don't tell me that's how they teach you down in Florida. These Cubans and whatnot? These rich guys can't dance for nothin' man.  Eddie got you just in time.  Dominicans only ones can dance.  Aw, too soon!"

The song was over and he pushed the button on the box.

"OK, whew, now, we got to get a drink . No, got to drink. Here, drink."

He came around to the bedside stand and picked up a small plastic cup with something darkish in it, and Viv sipped.

"Nope, all of it or Eddie's gonna be mad. But, naw. Naw, see how she drinks that old stuff for Eddie.  Aw, she does like me a little bit after all, I got to stick by her. Got me a lady can dance the Tango I better stick with it. Guys be so jealous of me. Little O-2 now, here we go."

He held a different cup while she sipped…

"OK, breathe real nice and rest for me now. Rest now. Let me just sit beside you for a minute, ‘til maybe you catch a nap. Whew, got to catch my breath, too. Eddie'll see you tomorrow about this time, OK? I know tomorrow's not my day, but you act nice, you try a little harder to eat, I might pass by anyhow. They tell me you not eating. You gonna eat a little more or what?"

Viv nodded.

"OK then."

Eddie sat a moment longer, his own eyes closed, head back. Viv closed her eyes and her breaths seemed to come easier.

After a moment Eddie snapped himself to, packed his stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff into a blue shoulder bag, picked up the tape player and came out into the living room. He took a reddish leather jacket from the table, put on a matching leather cap and motioned me with his head to come out into the hallway.

"I'm not sure what this doctor told you," he said. "Viv's not doing so good. She has a large mass in the lung.  It's too widespread to operate."

"You mean she's not going to live?"

"I'm only the nurse.  But what I can tell you is that she has a large inoperable mass in her lung and that she's getting weaker every day."

"Does she know."

"Yeah I think she does now. At first she was saying it was just the same old emphysema. But I think she's making the switch now. You see a lot of people, you get so you can tell when they more or less get it. You see them start thinking more of their good things.  She told me about her going dancing with some Cuban dude in Florida is why I bring in the box for a minute. Bring back some good times maybe."

"How long does she have?"

"She can probably live a little longer if she'll take more nourishment. She could go fairly soon if she doesn't.  So she has a little control that way. Also, I think she's been waiting for you to get here."

"Why? What can I do?"

"Like I said. She's trying to get hold of her good things. Memories and shit. Probably that's where you come in. You knew her when she was young. Help her think back to when she was hot."

He gave me a quick up-and-down look.

"Ever been to the Bronx?"

"No."

"Well, we got to go up and look around one time."

A beeper on his belt went off. He took it and glanced at it.

"OK baby, gotta go. I'll catch you next time."

"Dominicans Only Can Dance," set on the Upper West Side, is an excerpt from a novel in progress.

Diane Simmons has published short fiction in Northwest Review, Fiction, Green Mountains Review, Local Knowledge, College Hill Review and Hamilton Stone Review. Her novel, Dreams Like Thunder (Story Line Press), won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction.  She heads the Writing and Literature Degree Program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street.

Poem Written in a Café After Reading an Article
About How to Sit in a Cafe and Write a Poem
for New Yorker Magazine and Ignoring It

Four terrace tables over
A dog wears a collar,
Though not a dog collar.
He wears a high white plastic collar,
For he has been injured
In an auto accident: non-fatal.
He is a chihuahua.
I do not know how many lives a chihuahua has,
        do you?

He sits like the chihuahua he is, sits in the lap
Of his owner who is clearly a lawyer.
A lawyer-woman-attorney with dark sunglasses
Who evokes in me pity
For the person or persons whose ass or asses
Will no longer be attached when she finishes
        suing them off.

Though ruthless, I think she is not cruel.
She has not forgotten how to laugh.
She laughs now behind her winedark sunglasses
As she kisses her chihuahua's head over and over
And the chihuahua is loving it
In its strange chihuahua-love way.

She seems a kind of Cruella Deville alter ego.
Cruella wanted to make a luxurious coat
Out of dalmation skins.  Chihuahua lawyer
Wants to skin alive any human who does not
Love and respect her dog.

I remain very, very quiet for many times
I have daydreamed of drop-kicking a yapping chihuahua
Very hard over a very high fence.

The drop-kick, you may recall,
Was a popular football surprise maneuver many years ago.
Now though, it has become, like many people and things,
Archaic, esoteric, and possibly obsolete.

Is something fundamental missing from her life
For which the dog is a futile attempt at compensation?
Or is it us, the huge mass of poor chihuahualess fools
Who have missed the open secret
Of filling the voids of life so simply?

But, my mind digresses.
They are, clearly, happy, the lady attorney,
And her little dog too.
Also, they will be rich.

But, they do not look up at the homing pigeons
Whose owner releases them into Brooklyn
Everyday as the sun goes down.

They circle their wings in and out of the sun,
Their wings become suns, they circle a farther arc,
Their bodies are suns,
The chihuahua does not see, the lawyer wears
Sunglasses too dark for the climate,
The sky is the low blue of a late day of early fall
The sky holds the pigeons to its heart,
The sky says "Pigeons, now you are become my heart...
Ahhh, so this is how a heart soars,
This is what they mean!...
Hey, look, look up lady with a dog, this is what they mean...

No, no wait, don't look,
Hold on a second, is this, does anyone know,
Is this kind of thing legal,
I mean, I've seen so many changes,
Meaning no offense...

Do you know of any laws?"

Don Pomerantz ' poems have appeared in Failbetter, Eclectica, Stylus Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.  He came to New York City from Western Massachusetts in the early 90s, more or less trading nature for possibility.  He spends his days as a special education teacher on the Lower East Side making his everyday life a bit of an adventure within an adventure.  He is happily attached to Barbara Feinman, semi-famous East Village milliner.

Above the subway grate, she flails briefly at a bee
that's mistaken her florid hat for substance.

The bee escapes, but her left earring, heirloom,
mother of pearl, drops through the grate.

She stands looking down into that small chasm
where barely considered has now crossed into gone forever...

...below the grate of lost things, on the single billboard
platform of a downtown train where he's waited seated,

he now waits standing and sees what could be an angel
flash into his tiny sky. In a bit of sunlight, some mote,

it falls as if rushing to alight on the steely ceiling
of the oncoming train to make of it a worthy thing

where resignation is permitted to cross into
small miracles, as he prepares to board.

Don Pomerantz ' poems have appeared in Failbetter, Eclectica, Stylus Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.  He came to New York City from Western Massachusetts in the early 90s, more or less trading nature for possibility.  He spends his days as a special education teacher on the Lower East Side making his everyday life a bit of an adventure within an adventure.  He is happily attached to Barbara Feinman, semi-famous East Village milliner.

it is something i've never had
- a contraction – the type caused from
a baby's head exploding into
an arrogant world     just the other day
my co-worker spent damn near
a half-hour babbling about her first
and second pregnancies     how the
contractions came in rhythms
slow slow then fast    beating the
life drum between her legs
she reminisced about how at first
she had something that sounded
like one of my ex-boyfriends
‘a Braxton Hicks'
‘a false labor'  in layman's terms  
i'm confused but nod anyways  
she talks about the uterus
clenching and releasing
like Morse code
a dot dot dash that symbolizes
birth is beginning
it's funny that the only contraction
i know about is the linguistic kind
the type that is "improper" to
use in business letters
my contraction involves two
individual and independent words
merging together to form
a new word
for example
I am – I'm
He is  - He's
They are – They're
a collapse
an origami fold into greatness
you know, the same way two people
enter each other like the dusk
leaning into night and nine
months later produce – a contraction

Celeste Doaks is a Hoosier by birthright, but called Brooklyn her home for over 10 years. Currently, this poet and journalist is pursuing her MFA at North Carolina State University and misses midnight sirens, house music, and cheap corner-store Chinese food. The only other thing she loves more passionately than poetry are her two 10-year-old nephews.