Roy DeCarava. Lingerie, New York. 1950
William Gedney. Brooklyn. 1966
I. You have no plans for your birthday.
II. Stay up until you’re in competition with the sunrise on a set of shallow outdoor stairs while your first day at 20 melts off — sitting, laying, talking, limbs over limbs, with a beautiful patchwork human collective you picked up in an art room.
III. A sad smiling ex-dancer with an empty pack of cigarettes and pockets full of nostalgia, a caramel textured voice spiked with activist’s passion in the throat of global literati youth, an artist’s/intellectual’s mind you can’t imagine you’d ever see each corner of even if you had a thousand years to talk, under hair sacrificed once for a press bed and copper plate, above attire as elaborate as who it’s all been draped on.
IV. They keep you animated until 3am. Another night, twelve.
V. I hope you keep them. They make you glad to have had no plans.
I mapped a walk around the city of Rome.
