my apartment

the poetry reading is in a basement, with a fireplace and no windows. i want to hibernate there, three months of rest in a darkened baroque den under a pool bar. instead i get high on the quality of the verse and pitch an essay about the lifestyle of bohemian new york authoresses to a poet/editor in attendance. but i don't want to write it. i just want to write about my apartment. 

my apartment is lucky number 17

my apartment is filled with chestnut,
like my hair

my apartment's block was dutch

then italian, irish, & german

& then, since the 1960s, chinese

it has dumpling shops & art galleries

old tenements & an unfinished new build 

a boutique & a coffee shop that carried my poetry

& a parking lot between my building & george's

in which vladko works & kenny & mishka live 

audrey munson 

my three favorite statues in new york are the angel of the waters, in central park, the temperance fountain, in tompkins square park, and civic fame, which i can see from my window: a 25-foot gilded copper figure modeled after "america's first supermodel," audrey munson. the first statue bearing "miss manhattan's" likeness, called three graces, was installed in the grand ballroom of the hotel aster when audrey was 18. she posed for dozens of statues before fleeing new york at age 28 after a doctor killed his wife to be with her. she tried to kill herself at age 30, but lived on, and surpassed 100.

she's in the air here, sensitive, proud, and delicate. 550 feet up, crowning the beaux-arts municipal building, holding a laurel branch and a crown of five turrets festooned with dolphins. she looks like an acquaintance from years ago, a woman named maia who wore sequined gowns to the 8-ball space. one night we broke into my office to print dozens of missing flyers for her friend, who'd destroyed her burner and gone searching for drugs. she found her, then moved out west and had a baby. 

the parking lot 

Henry & Market, by Peter Brown

george has lived on henry street for nearly all of his seventy years. he's the super for the building next to the parking lot, where he lives on the second floor and doesn't use air conditioning. i met him in the parking lot one particularly hot day, when i'd brought down a bottle of ice for kenny and mishka. kenny was feeding mishka fried chicken. everyone loves mishka, and george and vladko told me how good it is to have him on the block. he takes care of the rats. i watched him do it one night from my fire escape. he chased a rat into a basement alcove and i heard one last squeak! 

george and i sat in the chairs in the parking lot and talked for two hours, until vladko said, "it's time, guys," and shut the gate. i received a key to the lot recently, after having been a customer for almost a year, and it felt like getting a key to the city. kenny occasionally comes by after the lot has been shut, and when i see that, i let him in. he doesn't speak much english, but we communicate. we smile at each other, and he knows i have cats, so he meows at me, and i meow back. 

four paintings 

a rose                a birdhouse                a mask                 & shapes 

A rose

steven, who recently turned forty, gave out dozens of his paintings at his thirty-third birthday party. i took the mask, set against a lilac backdrop, scrawled over in gold script: i love you. 

my dad painted landscapes in the '70s. winter scenes, mostly: dead leaves and hills and a goose in a moment of pause. i asked my mom if i could have the birdhouse hanging from a branch in the snow. she obliged, and hung in its place a sketch of a simple wooden chair. it hangs below a painting of another chair, an adirondack. 

soft grey is my favorite color, and it floats up in nick's painting behind a long-stemmed rose. 

one of kyle's stories opens with this poem: 

I am bored and in pain
For which there seems no cure,
And for which no amount of dark muttering or
Hours pacing the street in gorgeous autumn daylight,
Nor state-sponsored prescription
Seem to alleviate
This completely rhetorical question pertaining to doom, fate and death
That has plagued bored men since the beginning
That has put them through so much unnecessary pain
That is so much more funny and so much more serious
In my head,
Or in Bonnard’s painting of himself in hell
Surely better than any answer I could hope to ascertain
What a beautiful painting
What beautiful poems come after
These illusions fade,
I hope

Shapes

his painting's right side is blue and angry. anger on grey, above a red liver. the left side: candy-pink flames under burgundy wallpaper; hovering spheres of yellow-brown, olive-grey; turquoise darts on a white expanse; a swish of kohl in the corner. the decisions i've made in my life don't always make sense, but they do when i look at paintings. 

redecorating 

my apartment for dolls and immigrants, i wrote on my story one day. i rarely consider function; i consider form and feeling. my apartment reflected this, and as a result, until recently, no one had a place to sit. i cherished the paisley loveseat, but i wanted my friends to visit. now they sit on a sand-colored couch that spans two walls. and i'm going to hang the shelves. and the screen. and the paintings.