Port Authority – GWC Mag

after Riding Over the Brooklyn Bridge, by Robert Wood Lynn

I dissolved into unemployment and I cherished
the worst of it. Dollar Pizza’s nails in my stomach
and the long mountains of Pennsylvania’s
rain in my midnight’s future: New York was over.
Or at least invisible to my desire, which was not, it turns out,
a reliable strategy for survival. Even when I turned my body into an
envy others could inhabit long enough for the city to feel small,
I was just waiting for the silence to resume.
One night the smell of fresh-poured asphalt cooling in
the acid drizzle meant that I was newly in love; another night
it meant I’d overstayed my welcome. Whole months I’d walk
the length of boroughs, mind melted off my landlord’s medical,
clutching two-thirds of rent in my account like it could get me
anywhere farther than New Jersey, clutching a half pack of contraband
Virginia Marlboros and a treat I hadn’t earned from a bodega I hadn’t learned
the name of well enough to walk into without headphones on.
It became more apparent every day that the soul of what it was
I was buying had been torched decades earlier, the soul of
what I was selling soon to follow. I remembered these men
haunting my block growing up, as though recently dropped
off by a probing crew on a UFO,
living in the illusions they had bought. And now I was on another’s
block in the illusion, in a city that felt like its own universe,
walking into the bus station with my funeral suit already on,
knowing the other side of Pennsylvania’s mountains
of rain held the dead and that the dead there would be
the few left who could tell the difference between the illusion
and the block itself.