The City She Was

My Hegemony

49 My Open Sesame The lyric tires me because it’s so familiar and open-mouthed. But stars—my default, a subversion of subversion. I got trained for this affect in the best schools by gray masters where awards were easy to imagine as arrival. Crepuscular wind, take me back to a wet and slithering modern or at least acknowledge the rift because I’m unrepentant. To throw fire into the kerfuffle is my wet dream. To anticipate the end times, my nerdgasm. (See? Do you recognize the vulnerability? I hope someone writes about it on his blog.) 50 Redaction We make dogma out of letter writing: the apocryphal story of Lincoln who wrote angry letters he never sent. We wait for letters for days and days. Someone tells me, I’ll write you a letter and I feel he’s saying, you’re so different from anyone else. Distance’s buzz gets louder and louder. It gets to be a blackest hole. I want the letter about the time we cross the avenue, and you reach for my hand without looking—I am afraid I’m not what you want. We float down the street as if in the curve of a pod and the starry black is like the inside of a secret. We’re drunk. The streetlight exposes us, which becomes the deepest horror. Yes. End the letter like that, so it becomes authorless. Then the letter might give off secrets: acid imbalances that detonate. ...