Click here to hear a song by BOB KERR

(lyrics below) 
​
It was the year
we named our children after songbirds
[don’t you know]
My son was Crow
My brother named his daughter Magpie
[Oriole]
My friend had triplets;
She named them Bunting, Chough and Jay.
[Hey-de-hey]
 
Before too long
They grew from hatchlings into fledglings
We kept them warm
We lined their nests with twigs and tinfoil
We fed them millet
We fed them suet, seeds and worms
 
Now they are grown
Who would’ve thought they’d be ungrateful
They changed their names
They go by Tessa, Kate and Arthur
They eat at Arby’s
And never raise their voice in song

--Bob Kerr

Bob Kerr is a playwright (and occasional songwriter) based in Brooklyn.  His plays include "The Potato Creek Chair of Death," "The End of the Road," and "In Search Of...Sasquatch."  www.robertkerr.net

It was the year all the girls carved their teeth into parallelograms, 
something about the aerodynamics of it all,
the year unmarried boys sought solace in crescent rolls. 
It seemed the clouds had borrowed trouble, 
demagnetized worn cirrus paths and went wanton.

It was the year the city sang so as not to stutter, 
breathy spell when New York misplaced its 
exhaustive nostalgia, the very glow groaning.

It was the year step mothers were patient, 
ganking hippie mama chic, 
every blue jay quitting the forest in a send up of phantom rings, 
making the nature scene with coveted spots 
on endangered species shortlists 
beside semicolons, beneath the black rhino. 

It was the year uptight fathers shed fussy suits, 
took up soft-serve and psilocybin, 
all their "We’ll sees" becoming "Absolutes," 
clobber barons on high holiday.
 
It was the year obtuse ideas confronted actuality with a smirk, 
their presumptuous ilk bought time playing chess 
with exoskeleton as rooks, musty snail shells and crackle cicada.
 
It was the year tweens smoked moths by surgical moonlight, 
that middling distance gone full mirage;
the year certain folks attempted forgiveness, 
but most just had sizable seconds of Stove-Top and gravy.

It was the year Ornithologists wept at the soaring 
octaves of red winged black birds...
field study, we strung carnations like wall-eyed 
cult girls waiting for their songs to loosen.

It was a deafening year, "Loudness had won."
We learned to thumbs-up out of sheer American speechlessness,
inarticulate druggists, shunning pill-form
opted for misted tonics, every nosegay mid-wilt.

It was the year the last adult passed away,
the honeysuckles rife with their honeying,
the year still-lifing cats dozed in Isosoles of sunlight, 
jilted brides in kelp crowns needled records, 
gathered recyclables at dawn.

--James Harvey 

James Harvey received his MFA from The New School in 2010 and has poems up at Boog City andsomanytumbleweeds.com.  He is fond of Atlantic swells, honey-mustard and bass guitars.

It was the year I broke my leg by being
So drunk a car ran over me & I didn’t feel it.

The year I had an offer to be a prostitute
As I waited in the hallway at 3rd and 9th
With the door open. 

The year Kathleen Hanna took off 
Her shirt and exposed her perfect breasts, 
Then reprimanded everyone for looking. 

The year, Tim, the guy I had been seeing,
Said he LOVED “cowboy eggs,” so I made them 
For like 2 weeks to please him. There’s a hole
In the middle you make with a small cup--
Like a shot glass, then put the yolk in the hole. 

He broke up with me even though I had
Perfected the technique. It was the year 

Of Blur vs Oasis when Noel Gallagher
Said Damon Albarn & Alex James should
“Catch AIDS and die.”

The year I wore chockers and drank an entire 
Bottle of methadone I had stolen
From a friend. 

It was the year I discovered I had antibodies
For Hep C and slight erosion of the liver.

The year I gave up drinking for pot & had
My first experience with MDMA. 

The year Brittany Spears had a reality show
And I thought, she’s just a nice, down-home
Girl with probably a really pushy mother. 

The year I started Grad school, got certified, 
Fired, and lost my shit.  

The year of electronic town criers, blogs,
Extraverts, and wild kindness. 

--Olivia Grayson

Olivia lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches expository writing and fundamentals of critical reading. She is the author of the chapbooks, Cat Lament and Being Female. 

http://oliviadgrayson.tumblr.com/

It was the year of deciding to live
in the room everyone had already left,
uncozy & plummy mules with little-girl voices
 
deciding life wouldn’t be about this:
house of proud rooms
house of promising “never
 
letting anything be bad again”
swirled with swizzle stick, poking
through the custardy, egg-tempera cake.
 
No one will tell you
that the room is actually the kitchen
and the labyrinthine city was the new appliance,
 
happy, full, (auto)mobile(d)
Havana, Detroit’s little sister.
The room is sea, dipping its hip
 
into a bouquet of bugs, a mosquito’s kiss.
This city, screaming “you know
better than to drink when you’re blue!”
 
--Christine Reilly
 
Christine Reilly's first novel, Sunday's on the Phone to Monday, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2016.  She teaches at the Dalton School and lives in New York, New York.  Learn more at www.cjreilly.com

 It was the year hotcakes cooked on sidewalks and puppies hopscotched between solidifying pock-marked batter. Even better was when sun-warmed blueberries fell from bushes and tasty breakfast was always baking.
 
There were flies that year, until spiders invited them into their traps and spinnerets, their looms, crochet hooks, their subterfuge and spongy fudge.
 
That was the year no one went hungry. That year, children excelled in school. That year the scent of air sent sweet, kind sentiments everywhere.

--Martine Bellen

It was the year of not being able to find the birds in the sky
And the sky was everywhere scored by starling cloud     With starting gun
Those who listened faithfully could locate the patterns they made
As the sky was everywhere and the music leaked thru from the other side

It was the year when the other side of everywhere first began to take shape
It took it from the age of sentiment and from the utopian impulse
From flowering cherries and the conquest of space
It took shape and made with it an aviary resembling planet earth 

It was the year avairy earth graffiti first appeared in Brooklyn    Then Paris  Bogata  Akbar 
Entire city blocks were painted overnight with the thrilling songs of migration 
Hundreds of The Friends of Aviary Earth groups were formed on Facebook
The virtual feather became the defacto trademark of the moment

It was the year of the birth and death of the virtual feather 
This much I remember   The sky was everywhere filled with conquering sentiment 
Music leaked thru the flowering trademarks    It took shape 
and made with it hundereds of impulsive songs resembling planet earth

--Jean-Paul Pecqueur

Jean-Paul Pecqueur’s first book was titled The Case Against Happiness. A chapbook To Embrace Sea Monsters was recently published by Greying Ghost Press. Originally from the pacific northwest, He currently teaches creative writing to fine arts students at the Pratt Institute and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
http://www.h-ngm-n.com/17/jean-paul-pecqueur.html





 

of getting used to nothing, 
of feeling lucky that it wasn’t us the city ate. 
Uptown and down, the indigenous 
were caught in the rubble. 
The phantom residents of 
the instant glass towers above 
were revealed and no one blinked. 
Their decentralized funds erased us, 
made us Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, 
Kuala Dubai, gleaming and vacant. 
Our rents moved to the 
vigesimal system of the ancient Maya. 
We were hired to play versions 
of ourselves like Hawaiians, 
in graffiti grass skirts dancing for CronutsTM. 
My one true hero was 
the mummy Buddha monk of Ulaanbaatar, 
stiff but alive, dusty in his rainbow body. 
I invoked him every time 
a new Brooklyn asshole 
decided I wasn’t from there. 
I shut down cross-legged, 
radiated anti-authenticity, 
my skin cells flaking as the asshole tried 
to move me to a museum lobby for sale. 
I let the roaming coyotes do the work of 
terrorizing the interlopers and the ghost rich. 
The MTA pitched in with their expertise 
in disorientation and abandonment. 
I decided on a meeting spot 
for after the temples fell, 
in the uptown forests 
of Inwood and Van Cortlandt. 
Telepathically, I texted 
the GPS coordinates to my friends,
included a map of the secret bike trails.

--Sheila Maldonado

Sheila Maldonado summers in Coney Island and winters in Washington Heights.