Yeah, so, I used to have this job, right, writing ad copy for sex workers. I would like go online to find these reviews of other sex workers—you could always tell the real johns, who wrote about exits and off-ramps and discreet parking—and then I’d basically steal the parts I liked, you know, maybe use my imagination a little, but try to stick to facts pretty much.

A poet and critic of minor gifts, Silvio Artifoni moved to Williamsburg after jazz musicians and painters had consolidated, but before developers, architects, and graphic designers arrived.

Leo Kaufman had gotten so used to playing the bohemian Jew from Manhattan that he forgot what it was like to be one. Columbia had kids who could play the bass, who could write poetry. They practiced all day in the basement of Delta Phi, versified at the Hungarian Pastry Shop until closing.

Anton married Becca Kaufman a few years after they graduated, she from Brown and he from RISD. Then, after ten years, a stalled career as a conceptualist, and two kids later, he had too many at Leo’s reception.

Too many choices, literary and otherwise.

“Self-expression is not a crime,” reads a piece of graffiti in East Williamsburg. Maybe it should be.

Cocaine is a central commodity of the neoliberal age; so, too, its re-processed form (“crack”) for the desperately poor in de-industrialized cities of the North and South Atlantic.

Every year people die, get crippled, or suffer deformities at Christmas. This year alone the cops nabbed twenty-seven tons of contraband fireworks, and more than three hundred people burned to death from those that got through. Mostly kids.

Flapping his arms in widening, counter-clockwise circles, Richard Melville finds he can fly. It isn’t really flying, though, more like some suspended animation catapult.

Greed will kill you.

Ramón Antonio Jaramillo looked through Estrecho’s cemeteries, but had yet to find his grave. Until he did, he couldn’t prove that he didn’t die on Christmas Eve eleven years before.