By John Proctor
When you follow a low crescent moon down the West Side Highway, past early October fireworks over the Palisades cliffs, under the George Washington Bridge that shuffled you into this city sixteen years ago and you feel for a moment that rush of expectation, of imagined colonization that you’ll never feel again, that was never real in the first place but it feels like the only thing for this ephemeral, echoing moment, before you come back to this also-moment, when you’re driving back to Brooklyn from your job in Westchester County like you do every Thursday evening, and the crescent sliver looks so thin, so fragile as it lowers to meet the shimmering Jersey skyline, and you remember standing at the Queens Plaza train station at 2am composing lines in blank verse in your journal as that same moon vanished into the glistening teeth of midtown Manhattan—you called that piece “And the City Swallowed the Moon” but now, fifteen years later as you pass West 30th and the moon dips behind Jersey City, you know even New York can’t eat the moon. It’s just moving into someone else’s skyline.