The Official Literary Journal of the City College of New York
I always knew drowning was the way I’d go. When I was a kid, I would park myself in front of the refrigerator in the dead of night, a plastic cup in my hand. Over and over I would refill the cup with water and empty it down my garbage chute esophagus.
I always knew drowning was the way I’d go. When I was a kid, I would park myself in front of the refrigerator in the dead of night, a plastic cup in my hand. Over and over I would refill the cup with water and empty it down my garbage chute esophagus.
My Neopets have been dying for ten years. I forgot the password to my account and the associated email address no longer exists, so my colorful pixelated friends are stuck in a prolonged state of suffering.
I blink once, twice, then six or seven times back-to-back and re-grip the steering wheel. Don’t even know that I noticed when I zoned out. Highway Hypnosis, I think they call it.
It’s July of 1979. I know it’s July because I don’t have to go to school, and I know it’s 1979 because I’m nine years old. It’s easy to tell the years because it’s my age, and I just have to add up from 1970. I’ll say it now: I’m no good at math. I’m glad I don’t have to do anything but add my age to the year.
I don’t remember my dreams. Peaceful sleep is a void. Gaps in time. Sometimes, though, I’ll be out somewhere, doing something, and think: I’ve been here before. Cycles. Circles. Rings and spirals. Déjà vu. That’s how I know it’s not real.
I hate tradition, that is exactly what I have found out about myself over the years. I would say it all started when I was around ten or eleven years old. I was still living in my cozy little childhood town of Peine, Germany.
Helen sat on the toilet in her workplace bathroom with her black denim jeans pulled down to her ankles, checking her oxygen with an oximeter she had purchased over the pandemic. There was no reason for her to be checking her oxygen this early in the morning, except for the incessant worry that she could drop dead at any moment.
Mini was the first schizophrenic person I ever actually knew—besides my Uncle, who I only really knew of, and the people on Eddy Street that talked to themselves, who never really knew anybody. When I met her I was living in Daly City, renting a bedroom from a man I pretended to be Republican for; in the rental listing he stated he was looking for someone with “strong family values.”
This is a story about compost, and it ends—fittingly—with death.
It begins, however, on a Tuesday: the first Tuesday of the month, at six o’clock in the evening. Six o’clock in the evening on the first Tuesday of the month is a time which, if you were in the know, would signify to you that the residents of 77 Lilac Street are almost done with their House Meeting. Outside the moon takes its time to rise, cannot be rushed.
There was no time for tears when your bilge pumps failed. Somewhere about two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras, where the HMS Bounty sank and left its captain drowned. You tried not to think of him, swallowed up in those same waters. All you should have been thinking about was keeping your heading, two hundred-five degrees, with some variance to take the ocean swell on the boat’s quarter.
We named you Elisabeth after this street, Elisabeth Street—look where I’m pointing now—on the south side of the city, starting at Fifth National Bank—that’s the square building with the bronze cuckoo on top—and it ends somewhere around the big convention center—the glass circle building where they hold the dance recitals and the spelling bees—where it becomes Convention Center Dr. and no longer Elisabeth St.
In school he was brave, bombastic, hyperkinetic.
Did you know
bears do not sleep
all winter long?
I am tired of being the soft thing—
the first time you cooked
for someone else
you weren’t quite sure if you knew them at all
Every time someone said your name,
You would either glare and rebuff them
Or smile shyly and hide your face in the crook of your arm—
Touch me, darling, like I’m not a fragile thing.
I just think — creativity is involuntary.
They silenced me with a curse,
Every summer the stories whirlpool until they snag
The congregation shout and wave their hands,
While perspiration makes his brown skin shine.
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Do you want my story? Turn away. I have nothing to offer you. Nothing spurious. Nothing enchanting. I know stories can corrupt me, so I have surrendered them. I have become an ascetic. I have chosen an austere, circumspect life. I am no legend. I am no parable. I refuse to be a lesson. My greatest accomplishment is my anonymity. It is required for my line of work.