My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 90

Leaving New York at the sight of Fire-Breathing Torches, Broadway, March 5, 2014
I want to tell the city of New York to build: more churches like the one on 96th and Amsterdam,
white gothic patinaed steeple: more hole-in-the-wall cafés selling dosas and chai like those
American Southwest Hindu temples made of clay earth and slender men with dreadlocks, golden
Gustav Klimt paintings so luminous from beneath a cityscape canvas. I want to tell them to feed
the seagulls, eagles on the Hudson and dig worms from beneath rotted alleys, spear life above
every subway molehole so the fossilized museum sea monsters can see, tender pink from birth
with scrunched ugly old man faces turned up to the sky like the gargoyles outside Central Park —
plant an oak in the middle of Times Square reflecting the seizure lights there, is no calm here,
only glorious youth — I want to splash the graying skies with modern art, watercolors dripping
into streets battered low by stilettos, strikes, dark-framed glasses with no lenses, nicotine,
cigarette smoke — but you can’t build old buildings over skyscrapers, they say through fur-tipped
welding masks that catch fire from every spark, you can’t look back, you just can’t know — New
York City, a wild, beautiful creature that eats your money to survive the long winters, pulsing
neon with a ravenous, cavernous heartbeat. Its hide is painted with three-day old urine stains,
rare purple musks harvested from exotic shores. Its teeth are endless and sharp, drawing blood

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without warning, but it’s rump is almost canine when it wags and there’s a snaggle-toothed grin
behind every potential pickpocketer who reminds you of someone you loved or wanted badly
to love or read about till you fell in love so even in hating it all you’ll forgive it almost anything.