103 Orchard Street (2014)

Emily Gordon

Luxury hotels and the old corset shops

still sit side by side. How are the corset shops

making money? Who’s visiting them?

An Orthodox wife has the gift: she can size

your cup size with her eyes. The man

puts dainties in a bag at the counter,

averting his eyes, but pleased by the sale.

Pleased by the sale! It hovers on bigotry.

But the residents of Orchard Street

would have been envious of this storefront,

not a back room in a lightless hovel,

making clothes whose collars cut you

from the sink scrubbing and the starch.

Almost everyone’s an immigrant. New Yorkers

who brag they were born here can be green

and sheltered as a shtetl farmer. More.

Is it wrong to want to lose your accent?

It depends which accent. You sound

a lot friendlier on the news these days

if you don’t seem, say, German.

Is it wrong to forget where you’re from?

My great-grandmother Ooma moved

uptown and looked back in the perfect

American way, sentimentally and for profit.

The standing up. The washing. The constant

baby filth and the filthy slops of water.

It’s so easy to sentimentalize. The simple life!

The family playing rummy by gaslight

at twenty-five cents a stint of warmth.

Poverty isn’t simple. Even rummy isn’t simple.

The father miserable. Keeping up their spirits.

The mother wondering if he would even stay.

How old is old enough to start working

in a factory? New Englanders had their kids

of two hired out to rich neighbors for chores.

Who gets to be mothered? 1770s Mary Cooper

never got to sit down. This Italian mom,

this German wife, surely didn’t either.

How was there even time for sex?

Maybe the price of more children

was worth it for the brief vacation.

In the gift shop we see Malcolm Gladwell,

millionaire immigrant from Ontario

where good college was practically free.

There are kitsch novelties. Jacob Riis.

It seems right, the history all mixed

and matched, all New York, all America,

the whole sloppy history of humans

who try to go somewhere, try to run

from pogroms or religion, families

or bad reputations, joblessness

or untillable land. There is a “to”

to America, but it’s a lonesome “to,”

a bursting “to,” a “to” that doesn’t

understand you, that’s ever-ready

to waste or replace or forget you

without warning. At Orchard Street

we tramp the lighted stairs,

so dark and slippery with foul water

in the mind’s eye, so easy to escape

when we are us, when I am here

without a “to,” without a “from,”

but all the choices, none of the steel wool.