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We get seats near the top of the tiny theater, latecomers squeezing in along the rafters, no one knows how to do this anymore so we are all foals finding our footing together, there is a sweet kindness in the steps. They read poetry and verse, sing songs, tell stories, we clap and cheer and remember what life is lived in the margins, you hear new words tell themselves to you and you think maybe the last two years were rough because the magic didn’t have room to whisper itself to you in the stillness. For a short while you feel the illness that sits in you abate, feel the lightness on your chest that comes with breath, remember what it is to be human. Your heels click clack across the cobble stone all the way home, you love New York like your life depended on it and it does, oh it does, today a bright pink couch was delivered to the little shoebox on 6th street and I know what they will say about me when I’m gone but lord, I am not afraid to say it while I’m still here, it comes out at odd angles but all it speaks 

is truth.