poetry
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you can take a walk through East New York, or Navy Hill, or Greenwood Heights, and one person will think these are really frightening, dangerous places and rush right out of there. and someone else will take their time and explore the history of those neighborhoods, sample the unusual foods and sounds on the streets,…
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I never know what to say after someone says, ‘your music is beautiful,’ except to agree with them. for me, beauty is an end of conversation. the beginning is different: this is when you have to be suspicious of your best lines, your best melodies, tell the unusual from the boring. beginning kills. but beginning also produces all the discoveries. that’s when you start…
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winter arrives early and takes its place at the window. the sky this afternoon has filled the air with snowflakes. there’s a single ray of light now in my little apartment, pale and thin as the subway rail carrying the Q … from Prospect Park to 7 Av, then Atlantic, then DeKalb.
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when I started out, I decided I was going to get a gig at a famous club in New York City. its purple neon beacon, hanging three feet below the century-old pressed-tin roof, blared two city blocks, a kind of downtown iconography. this was the kind of place where you could just feel the years,…
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I bought a new guitar today. well, not really new: an old Gibson J-45, rich and deep on the low E and A strings, with round shoulders, a wine-red finish and tortoise teardrop pick guard. she was standing in a city pawn shop, beautifully abandoned. she came with an exile’s suitcase and a belly filled…
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this bird comes every day and stops at the branch to sing for an hour or two, as if it were absentminded, trying to remember the melody from the day before. that’s all the bird does. nothing makes it happier. it wants me to listen to it sing as it leans over to my window. its honey voice’s precision, filtered through…
cookie nieves 