Writings

She searched the Island, from the Bronx to the Seaport, for something as spectacular as inspiration or Love. Inspiration she found flowing in a trickle under the tracks of the F line on 14th Street. Love remained more mysterious, though she searched high as the Empire State and low as the tunnel between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. What she longed for was as beautiful as the Chrysler building, turned on its head, drilling into her heart with points of light and sparkle, majestic and real.

She found Him on the Bowery, sitting on a golden throne next to Buddha himself, surrounded by disciples in the Love War. They meditated in parks on Sunday next to the crack heads and beneath tree branches strung with discarded plastic bags. His eyes were small and dark, his chest broad and lightly sprinkled with curls, a lightning bolt of a scar ran across the inside of his left wrist. Every week they would climb 4 flights to sit in the golden light and listen to him speak, then join him for sushi where he’d sit at the head of the table like a grandfather at Thanksgiving.

She climbed those steps because someone told her to, to listen to the words not the voice. She began to watch his adam’s apple and knew she was in trouble. She soon sat across from it over coffee, she walked beside it on sidewalks moving like mobius strips for blocks, reciting poems. She kissed it over and over and not for the voice any longer, but for the man.

She took the L train to see him, waiting on the platform in heeled boots, the L running by so quickly, it made her stutter…LLLLLLLLove.

He came to see her on 1st Avenue and 11th, an address with so many ones in it it was no wonder she’d lived there so many years alone.

Allen Ginsberg used to live one block away from her. Allen Ginsberg was in the picture on her dresser meditating in front of a Tibetan picture with his mala. Allen Ginsberg, she swore hooked her up with free wireless so she could email her poems to journals late at night after the boy had gone.
Allen Ginsberg. The boy had known him when he was young. The boy had had a poetry lesson or two while his parents were in the other room with some Tibetan.

Oh, Karma Boy! Certainly Allen had something to do with it! Certainly he landed on both their fire escapes one night with the wings of a garuda whispering, “wake up!” into their ears in forgotten languages. Certainly he opened some portal between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, between his heart and hers, a portal humming with the fluid songs of yoga and beating with the pulse of New York and silent as a meditation where you’re so deep you think you can touch something.

When he asked her to move in, she hopped the East River like a stone. They lived under the bridge like a couple of trolls. He said she was safe. She felt safe. She let her words out, the ones in the back she usually didn’t say out loud, only wrote about. Karma pushed her words out to the surface, it was time to let them fly away, bats at night.

After he fell asleep, she would tip her ear close to his lips to listen for his. Slowly, she missed him. She thought she saw his adam’s apple growing larger with words unsaid. Slowly, she missed him. She asked him what he had to say. He said nothing.

She let more words fly around the apartment like run-on sentences written in the blackest ink. She let them out because she loved him and he loved her and she had wanted to be safe and he said it was, and what could be born in a house of two writers, if not words?

Till he said something. A sentence or two of dangling participles, brushing her out of the house like used, tired out bristles on a wiry broom.

Oh, Karma Girl. And that apartment had been there before, on first and eleventh, after the Actor and the Musician. But this time it was different. She had kissed Allen on the forehead with a sloppy Goodbye, she had almost let the lease run out. Because this boy had been different. This one had sat on cushions with Allen and watched thoughts pass like clouds. She did not want to be a cloud, she wanted to be more tangible than that.

She wanted to be as tangible as shut doors and movers and one-word text-messages and the New girl with a New name. She wanted to stick in a brain and in a heart.

Oh, Allen, is the pen a phallus after all? Something to put notches on, a magic wand?

Oh, Allen, is the portal between two worlds and two lovers so slippery one can slide right out? She thinks she hears her heartbeat rumbling under the ground on 14th street, but its only LLLLLove, running the other way, across town.

Oh, Karma. Is this the other side of what happens when you think nothing happens? When you just walk away, what is following you? When you choose silence over discretion what is that big wave of breath and vowels that follows you till it crashes on the shore of your right hemisphere where you wish it didn’t belong? When you walk up flights of stairs to a golden light daily, what is housed in that big red cushion you are sitting on?

What’s it like to be marooned on an island of eight million?  All the skyscrapers became big arrows pointing her away. There wasn’t much room for love anymore, and the trickle of inspiration on the F line was drying up with summer heat. Love was being crowded out, gentrified, the Lower East Side being built up with condos, “shadow maps” of where buildings would cast their dark sides. She waited for Allen to land on her fire escape at night. He never came.

She needed so much scaffolding to hold her up now. She wondered who she could trust if not poetry brushing up against her window like the wings of a bat, a fire bird, a moth reaching for the light, asking her to speak? She wondered if she could trust a city with no attics any longer, for where did people keep their hope chests?

Hope, the one show not lit on a marquee on Broadway. Hope, unaffordable, in the windows on Madison avenue with a dress and bag and a bored salesgirl. Hope, covered in discarded gum turned to tar on once-silver-sidewalks. Hope, growing quietly on awnings about to be torn down.

Oh, Karma Boy, she wanted you to be something else and not that. Oh, Karma Girl, he wanted you to be something else and not that.

And Allen is walking his toes through their grass, carefully stepping around the new seeds planted by them during that swampy season of love and loss. Oh, Karma, you do not love or hate, just grow, in whichever direction you were planted.

Sarah Herrington is an accomplished poet and fiction writer. Her poetry appears in the anthology Bowery Women alongside writers such as Sapphire and Anne Waldman, and her fiction in the upcoming book Just Like A Girl. She has published work in dozens of print and online journals including SmallSpiralNotebook, Poetry Motel, and Altar Magazine. Sarah has worked in the editorial departments of Scholastic, Inc, Viking Children’s Books, and for New York City’s largest Creative Writing school, Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Sarah currently works with Girls Write Now, teaching and mentoring teenage girl writers. She is a regular reader at the Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, Halcyon, St Marks Poetry Project, and other venues. Her poem-videos have appeared on YouTube, and she has been featured in Venus Zine. She received her degree in English and Creative Writing from New York University. Sarah lives in New York City and online at www.sarahherrington.com

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