Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

New York

After a week in New York,
coming back to Nashville
is like checking in to a funeral home.
It’s dead here.
Dead on the streets.
Dead in people’s cars.
Dead in the restaurants.
There is no 3 a.m. Chinese dinner.
Or real Italian linguine cooked by Sicilians.
Gone are the East Coast accents
and with them,
the thick slices of pizza dripping with cheese.
No smell of subway stations
or rodents.
No four hundred square foot apartments going for two thousand a month.
No corn beef piled high
on real rye bread from the Lower East side.
No Patisserie Claude and his incredible apricot tarts.
No café con leche served by Dominicans in a coffee shop that has existed for twenty-five years
where no one speaks English.
No empty faces to get lost in
and wonder why about.
No one sitting across from you on the train,
fighting to stay awake,
lunging forward and back,
teetering on the brink of falling.
In Nashville, the pleasantries eat you alive.
In New York,
you feel like you could scream
if you wanted to
and no one would care.
It would be o.k.
even acceptable.
Here,
you’d be put away in a second.
In New York,
anything can happen.
A gang of street kids can take over a subway
and put on a loud rap show
and you’d be forced to listen to it because you’re on an express
train and you can’t get off for another forty-seven blocks.
Here if you played a radio too loud
your neighbors would call the cops on you.
In New York,
you can see neon in Times Square
and you can dream that it could be your name in lights one day.
In Nashville,
neon is reserved for fast food restaurants
and nudie shows,
and a good bagel is only a dream.