NYC AS THE NYPD STATE

I moved to New York City the summer after 9/11. I was born in Brooklyn, but raised in Miami, so it was a return of sorts. The city was still visibly stunned and the country was astir with its color-coded thing; "Ground Zero" had stopped smoldering months ago, but the clean-up was well under way. Thousands had died which meant that hundreds of thousands were being directly affected which affected the millions grinding it out in the city. A deep sense of distrust, especially towards Arabs and East Asians, descended on the city like some medieval plague. The summer after 9/11 jobs became scarce as state and federal monies were put on hold so that our "response" might become apparent (nation building price tag and all). The Department of Ed and City University of New York had freezes; this or that Association was only hiring internally. The summer after 9/11, New York City still reeled from the pelagic psychic pain and ultra-deep remorse inflicted by those two planes.

Truth be told, the blackouts of 2003 left a much larger imprint on my experience as a New Yorker. I had not survived the simultaneous attack on the Towers that day so I could not rightly say that 9/11 had directly affected me, but being left without electricity for three days in 2003 is my infinitesimally small 9/11. Especially since, everyone completely assumed that the blackouts had been caused by another terrorist attack, and not overheated, overtaxed utility and power generator stations. The blackout of 2003 was an exercise in controlled chaos because many of the people that I encountered those three days were convinced our republic had imploded. The summer after 9/11, the subways were thronged with anti-terror police in body armor, scaring the shit out of everybody. Of course, though, it was for your safety, so unless you were heading up your own cell you shut your mouth and shared the platform with the swat squadron.

We were told numerous times a day that it was the new price of freedom. According to the Daily News, by 2008, the NYPD was already "reinventing itself as an intelligence and homeland security agency" as well as "the nations largest police department". As the country's hawks played with smoke and mirrors at the United Nations to obtain legitimacy for their eventual invasion of Iraq, New York City became one of the safest and best patrolled cities in the world with "37,000 officers," and "tens of millions of dollars - much it from federal grants - on an array of high-tech security measures designed to thwart threats." This is the reason that the NYPD is the only police force in the world with an international presence as many of its officers work in conjunction with Central Intelligence Agency analysts.

I lived in New York for a total of 8 years, the last 5 living in a Harlem enclave (Striver's Row) in a neighborhood were I stuck out like a thumb because I was Latino and not Black. I have lived in an attic on Church Ave in Brooklyn, and right on third Ave in Spanish Harlem; I have lived in a Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood where the world would shut down on Friday evenings in preparation for Shabbat. And I have been out and about to the wee hours of the night, intoxicated and stumbling, bumbling through wind-slapped city streets, industrial zones, and hipster kingdoms. And nothing has ever "happened"; I have never been mugged or pistol-whipped or knifed in the gut or taken advantage of in a violent and aggressive manner. I also taught high school for three years in the Bronx in a poor neighborhood with a large gang presence. So, I have seen fights, melees, and minor bar brawls, but I benefited directly from the safety and surveillance of a post-9/11 heavy police presence.

POSTCARD FEAT #2 BY YAGO S. CURA & JIM HEAVILY

Postcard Feat with Yago Cura & Jim Heavily

By Yago Cura in Postcard Feat

40 pages, published 27 AUG 2011

BUT WHAT IF THE MEDIUM TURNS OUT TO BE A MYSTERIARCH

The dead don't pull U-turns, they don't reconstitute on the wrong side of the Mirropane, or heckle the horses at the track. You won't find them returning an alternator belt, or buying peach ice cream from the Oaxacan.
The dead stay dead, like, well, like, we try to stay undead--with that verve and repugnant confidence. With that neck thrust forward to break the winning tape. With that beam of teeth and nose, with feral gumption and berzerker battery will.
Now, Harry Houdini had the eyes of a Siberian husky and the sinister countenance of a Bond villain plotting Atomic Mayhem Sequence, Doomprints, errant launch
key codes.
Inside Houdini's head possibly the closest megaphone for speaking to the dead.
And yet, he judged Spiritualists, seance mediums, and Coteries of Nostalgia to be bunkum bouyed by Philistines. And yet, Houdini went before Congress to tattle on the influence of the Fox Sisters, pesky mediums fleecing World War One widows, and the unjustly bereaved.
You can't convince me, though, that Houdini the Mysteriarch, the Emir of the Air, didn't know how to decipher frequencies of post-mortem supplication with elan.
I have seen him levitate amperes with Tesla; I have seen him juggle Torrs in Eiffel's laboratory salon. You ask me about my collection of fetters; there are none which can contaminate or contain me.

POSTAL DE JIM HEAVILY DE CANADA

BERLIN'S GARGLELANGUAGE

It's not words per se he peels from the air.
It's imperative Gibberish, forceful convolutions.

The front vowel "e" in see, tree, Daddy.
Over and over, with little regard for modulation
but almost identical in tenor and timbre, volume.

"e!," "e!," "e!," spliced on some Exultation Reel,
like a song long-distance swimmers repeat stroke
after stroke in their waterlogged minds.

Berlin can't rattle off the word, steam, but he's
breaking ground on ice chips and slivers of phonemes.

His tongue is starting to shove declarations, so it's only
a matter of seconds before he's gargling scaffolded utterances
and phrases mimed to our positive feedback?

How pregnant the now of his affricatives, how urgent
the "tch, tch, tch" of his future forays with words
like toy, church, judge, and eventually, torsion.