Erika Meitner
Fear City: A Survival Guide
the memory where my grandmother is a light-filled hole, where she takes me on the subway (blue E? orange F?) from Forest Hills–Continental–71st Avenue she is holding my hand on the platform (grey, pockmarked with black gum and green girders, yellow rumble strip with raised bumps warning us before the tracks) it is 1979 and I am in a coat (navy wool with toggle buttons) and the light in the station is pulled through the grate above us like thread through the eye of a needle though it’s impossible as the station was deeper underground than I remember so that light must have come from somewhere my grandmother with her coiffed helmet of jet black hair we were going to her office (why? I’m not sure) she worked in a showroom with bolts and bolts of fabric (an upholstery shop?) and on the platform before the silver train came there was a woman who was totally bald, her head shining in the pulled-in light and I want to say she was wearing a fox-fur coat but I’m sure that’s not right she was luminous and unashamed and tall but all adults were though maybe not my grandmother who was vain and stayed out of the sun and was (frankly) unpleasant not warm or beloved and when we were together we were usually silent unless she was instructing me in her clipped Austrian accent the last time I saw her alive in the time right before death (there’s a name for this space) when people get truer than usual lose their filter start saying things they normally wouldn’t and she pulled me to her white folded nursing home cot to warn me (I can’t remember the exact words) about not being sexually cold or frigid about making sure I had sex with my husband with someone because she had stopped and closed up shop long ago rolled desire up like a bolt of fabric the upshot was to stay open to pleasure to provide pleasure to accept pleasure and I listened to her never didn’t listen through invasive technology sutures boredom whatever came my way I grew up in Fear City where we tucked our necklaces in our shirts on the streets rode the subway in daytime only kept extra tokens laced into our sneakers heard hands up motherfuckers more than once knew at any moment on the sidewalk where bodies were in relation to ours this hypervigilant radar someone always flashing dick pissing against the side of a brick building but the city was always glittering at night even through the windows of a locked Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera cruising a bridge rusting into the East River grandmother the light I am still going towards it
Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Ideal Cities (Harper Collins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. She is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the creative writing programs.