The Selkie of the City Tells All

Abstract

The Selkie of the City Tells All Jd Scott (bio) We meet at the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island three years in a row. We meet on a rooftop on the Fourth of July, the air smoky with bodega-bought salutes. We meet on a broken-down B3 bus on Avenue U. We meet in front of Macy’s between holidays, the arm of an animatronic elf waving in the window display. We meet over dollar pizza. We meet at a concert in an empty pool basin in McCarren Park. We meet in Marble Hill. We meet during intermission. We meet at a rent party. We meet over a rent boy. We meet at a LAN party in Fordham. We meet through the divorce. We meet over hotpot in Flushing, our hands gunning for the same ladle in a tub of sesame sauce. We meet through mutual friends. We meet when the body is discovered. We meet at a rave in an auto-something warehouse beneath the BQE. We meet on DMT. We meet at the Bowery Mission. We meet on the same ferry for forty years. We meet at the Diptyque sample sale: your nose down by a candle, its name spelled in elongated French. You are a classically trained painter who makes do drawing sidewalk signs. You are an electrician with nine fingers. You are on the lam. You are a Slavic Studies major at Columbia. You sell nutcrackers every July at Jacob Riis. You are a piragüero perched up in El Barrio. You make a 524 on your MCAT. You are half-retired, playing dice on the sidewalk in summer, playing a temporary snow laborer in winter. You are a deaf waiter at Tavern on the Green. You read tarot on Grand. You are an absentminded dog walker. You have a stutter. You have the cutest button dimples. You are fighting for your life on Rikers Island. You own a beautiful home in Astoria. You rent a basement beneath a bakery in Sunset Park and break in at night to steal cháng zĭ bāo. You make the best chicken mandi rice in Morris Park. You were born (and will die) in Queens. You are twins who don’t know how to share. I remind you of a dentist, of a doorman, of a brother. I remind you of a son, somebody’s ex-best friend. We make small talk. I play it shy. I play it tough. I get real sweet when we get close enough. [End Page 126] Then I take my skin off. I am the city, and my skin is cigarette butts and piss-summer scent. It’s the same magazine sample of Santal 33 from Le Labo coated onto my pulse. My skin is neon and concrete and sakura blossoming at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden each May. My skin is high rise with all the lights on. It’s Times Square. It’s this is a Howard Beach bound A train, the next stop is Broadway Junction. It’s a warm cup of broth in a blizzard, a margarita in a Styrofoam to-go cup in June. My skin is sweat. My hair is kinky, slick, tight, loose, long, buzzed, gone. When you see me, you see the part you need. That’s when I stop being the city and become something you can perceive. That’s when I grow hands and knees. You see the twenty-three-minute affair at the Christopher Street’s westside piers. You see me for twenty-three years in your bedroom. When I take off my skin, you feel comforted. Most of you end up loving me. Sometimes I love you back. Always you see me until our end. Rarely do you see me until your end. It never gets easier, that part. I cannot give you eternity. I change for you, sure, but I change for myself, too. I compromise; I make amends. When I fold my skin like a coat in your closet, I become the only knowable part of me. When I give up my secret, it seldom goes well. Inevitably, you start plotting to keep me. You hide my...