And what is the voice, the voice asked him.
Zero cops
dicking off
near the metro-
card kiosks
see him
hopping
the smudgy
grey turnstile
& rain in his
rat hair
7:35 am to catch his Manhattan-bound L train to work.
We name the voice the jeremiad, he said.
11 strides
from the rear
& the MTA conductor
warning a girl
maybe 12 years of age
pink backpack
& pigtails
never to hold the doors for
oncoming passengers?
She lets them go.
“The jeremiad, then,” said the voice.
•
But in New York when it rains the subway
is like a ward.
Hard, said the jeremiad
not to smell the flankssteaming, non?And harder yet not to smell the sores?
107 standing
& 39 seated he counted them
& the passengers cheered that morning
when a young man
a woman’s black pea coat trailing behind him
beat the doors closing
& stood there panting before them & steaming.
Ask them, the jeremiad said.
And one by one in May of that year
every straphanger
who rode the L train to work in the morning
answered yes
when he asked the following question:
have you ever wondered
on your way to Manhattan
while the train is pitching below the East River
if the water broke through
what would happen.
•
By May of that year
319 times
L train to Union Square
6 train to 33rd St
40 minutes roughly
& twice daily
for $27,000 annually
his commute.
Outside the station that morning
in the shadow of the MetLife Building
(which he once wrote in a letter to Josie
birth name Johanna
looks like a wildebeest
lowering its head to drink from a river)
dogwood trees earning the season’s
first blossoms
thousands of which pink and dead in the gutter
& everywhere wafts of cum.
A war vet handing out leaflets & shouting
“free Johannesburg”
& how often in this town
the jeremiad said
one hears men & women shouting
free trial
free membership
buy one
get one free
no money down
zero interest
non?
But here was a man
shouting free Johannesburg
like he couldn’t give one away.
Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet, a 2015 National Poetry Series selection (University of Georgia Press, 2016). A recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, recent work appears in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Max Allison co-founded the label Hausu Mountain with Doug Kaplan in 2012, and his visual art appears on the label’s album covers and packaging. His designs reconfigure small samples of pixel art from 16-bit video games made for the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis into dense collages that stretch into spreads of isometric 3D space. He records music solo under the name Mukqs and plays in the projects Good Willsmith, BBsitters Club, Pepper Mill Rondo, Lord Mute, and Crazy Bread. Max lives in Chicago; you can find him on Twitter at @Goodwillsmith.
