Classic NYC Story

I feel your warm lips
calming the chilly primal shivers
that stiffen my breasts…

This poem
is not about you.
I don’t know you…

I had a million reasons why this encounter was not a bad idea. He had a body like an Adonis and a member like a rock. I was drunk nearly out of my mind and I had no husband to cheat on. He was an Out-of-Towner whom I will likely never see again. Technically it had been months since the last time I got any pleasure… and yet my pervasive thought became “why am I doing this?”

I called and left a message for my sister (Gemini), my friend in Boston (Taurus), and my ex husband (Aquarius) wishing them all “happy birthday.” I went around all day telling people “happy birthday” whose birthday it was not.

I think I commented on someone’s blog once that the fact that I was born in the Bronx, raised in Queens, and spent most of my adult life in Brooklyn and Manhattan makes me American by nationality… and technically it does, doesn’t it? But let’s be real. Ask somebody to call up a picture of American-ness and you’ll either get a mid-western or a southern picture. Chicago is America. Atlanta is America. DC is America. Des Moines, Iowa is America. New York is New York.

Because you won’t believe this conversation really happened unless I show you an excerpted transcript:

My God, is everything the same in this city? Houses, duplexes, brownstones, projects, black people, white people, Asian people, snobs, hustlers, workers, hookers, housewives, rich people, poor people, angry people, indifferent people, church people, heathens, muslims, buddhists, vendors, teachers, college girls, old men, botox-injected porn stars, carpenters, gas stations, chinese restaurants…

There was a brief moment after I moved out of Harlem that I decided to be an old widow. That would be my persona for the year of the tiger. And so now I sit here in a bathrobe typing away at a computer in Queens like an old widow…