Alexandra Reiss Biography

The subway comes above ground on 96th street, where men’s jockey shorts cling damply to the curb, defying dignity, where beer-battered boxes, cardboard constructions, stink outside on sidewalks: houses in front of houses.
Here, immigrants rush to fill the cracks of the rickety pre-war brownstones with memories of the old country and the smell of ethnic food. Who, here, remembers the Cotton Club? These houses, now just relics. Skeletons, of some brown-and-out bebop heyday.
On the corner a shopping cart doubles as a spit, and a man with plastic bags over bare feet, roasts a pigeon on a wire coat hanger. He hands out scraps of meat to a convoy of similar carts and rickshaws. Bits of bird are accepted as sacraments. Here, where church is held on the sidewalk and where bread exists
only as an abstract notion- unattainable, like money to pay the rent.
...

Timepiece
Congratulations watch-wearers!
You are cuffed
to an illusion.
...

It's not even a cute baby—
No cherubic redeeming qualities,
Just drool, set on course through
Gummy gap-toothed no return.
...

Creases brown and dirty, like a map-
creases caked with dirt, silt in tiny rivers.
Sweat compelled the dust on my palms
to form this geography.
...

I wonder what will finally get me in the end: the booze or the cold tablets.
Red-eyed awake: I contemplate the man.
You say he keeps you down. Really,
he keeps you up, swearing sweaty in the middle of the night.
...