by Kalyana Dey
Manhattan in January / and my heart was the evening
The city has stitches of our souls across town, superimposed beneath blue Saturdays and bug bodies, the green Christmas lights hanging from the bodega you love so much, the glow of a raw violet immortelle beneath clear plastic awnings, I hang around alley corners in the hopes that I’ll see you. But you’re always one step ahead of me, like the light before it shatters, the train before it stops, a tree bending before its leaves snap off in a storm, the vault awaiting a banker’s hands, the cocoa, the pretzel salt, the pigeons, frosted and pear-hued Central Park at four in the morning, you’re rocks and holes in socks and key-scratched train windows, a third of my veins, why don’t we find out how soft gold is, why don’t you know how to fix the neon lights and the costume seams, even the apartment bursts in edges at the thought of you, smoke-and-wine-stained you. When you’re back, we lose our money in bars and the leather seats of taxis, my makeup is blue then all over my cheeks, you’re crying over someone else at the diner and I’m laughing so hard into my bowl of cereal that the bartender threatens to kick me out. In a public cube where sidewalks are full of dazzle and gum, you kneel and tie my converse at my favorite intersection, the one with all the plants in the center and the spray-painted ice cream cones along raised medians. I miss flights for you, I get lost in bookstores and I pick up shifts, hoping to see you near Gristedes, I hear my grandmother’s fading language in my head, I wish you were around back then, to witness the quiet way she folded money into envelopes from the local bank, gently tugging out singles for lottery tickets whose numbers were our birthdays, we could have loved her together, we could have seen the 99-cent store cat, shabby-grey rat-eater, you’d have known to save me the holographic journals, you’d have kept the best Pokémon cards for me. And now we’re stamping through Manhattan snow, I want to tell you about the time I almost tripped into a lake before grabbing the hand in front of me but I know you’d care more about whose kisses went into what poems, you’d rather flirt with me when I have sprinkles on my eyelashes and a head full of lust, you’re interested in the sewers of my heart but you won’t stay the night, already you’re gone before the pigeons leave the awnings, twist of Tanqueray between fingers, a flirt with the grill girl before the rinse of dawn, later you’ll duck into bed with a raver dressed as a fawn and I’ll catch the tail-end of your dalliance, a glint of your star earring before you enter a cab, you turn around to inspect the block and all you see is a body hunched over the begonias, gathering flowers for a birthday or a funeral, maybe a wedding, maybe it’s better this way. I’m a stranger in your eyes and you’re the Brooklyn carousel, coated with rain, glittering gold as a jewel or a life, could you come over this time? It’s not that I’m falling for you, I just need someone to keep me honest before the streetlights come on.
Sam Moe lives in Normal, Illinois. She is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, Heart Weeds, is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, Grief Birds, is forthcoming from Bullshit Litin April 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.
Kalyana Dey is a young writer and photographer currently living in Singapore. She had lived on three continents and has an unhealthy obsession with Marvel movies. She can be found on Instagram @kaleidescope.kd