Poetry
Coney Island
I give to red-topped toy machine back a decal as I want
something else, better, what you have: rubber replica
of reptile, shock-purple and sinister. The small business
of setting out to do a day that started evening last
with soup and summer boredom ended up here, asleep
once more, clutch of fear in the sand. Concession calls
to wake us and we are two among the hunched, invisible
to the well oiled grotesque. Four-ticket ride for retribution,
eyes spun from upside-down, from bite and cannot scream.
Next whiskey has at a boardwalk bar, a watered down
one of my own. I could now dance like this strange pair
by the jukebox: resolved, fat and furrowed. But I am not
ugly yet or cheered. I want a room to keep a home.
I want a bed. (Lemonade. Sand again. Subway.)
Let me sleep on your lap. No tracks to cross bridges;
we are going underwater. Whatever we have done,
intending, had sun-marked a line flat to my flash. It hurts
like want hurts: that sweet. The rare side of no.
Contributor
Lynn MelnickLYNN MELNICK'S poems have appeared recently in the Boston Review. She lives in Manhattan.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Sticker Shock
By Paul MattickFEB 2022 | Field Notes
For 10 years, economists wondered: why is inflation so low? Suddenly, in the last few months, they wonder: why so high? In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “Economists are getting a dose of humility on forecasting inflation” as prices rise “well beyond the expectations of Wall Street and policymakers.”
Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All (2022)
By Nolan KellyDEC 22–JAN 23 | Film
Bones and All manages to balance the chaste intimacy of a typical YA novel with an appetite for the shock and gore of a body horror flick. But it is Guadagnino’s vision of 1980s Americana that arises as particularly potent for a film making a statement about the relationship between queer desire and social exclusion.
59. (Coney Island, 42nd Street, the Meatpacking District, among other locations)
By Raphael RubinsteinJUNE 2021 | The Miraculous
Deserted by his parents at a young age, subjected to abuse by his supposed caregivers, a New Jersey teenager finally has no option but to drop out of school and run away to New York City where he survives, barely and dangerously, as a street hustler. Now in his mid-20s and trying to make his way as an artist he embarks on a project that takes him back to many of the locations where he used to sell his body for sex: “the places I had hung out in as a kid,” he later explains, “the places I starved in or haunted.”
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde
By Brianna Di MondaNOV 2022 | Film
As it is, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022) is the twenty-second movie about Monroe, and when you look past its eye-rolling shock factor, its high-profile actors, and its attempts at arthouse, it remains the same tired story we’ve always gotten. But this time, Andrew Dominik, Joyce Carol Oates, and even Ana de Armas have the audacity to tell us that what they’ve done to Monroe is a feminist act.
