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The Cartier Street Review

Seasons Of Love

Eyes lock, hands touch, one

touch worth more than thousand words

heat courses through my veins

Enrico Miguel Thomas - The Subway Artist

Artist At Work - Next featured Artist for Cartier

This guy is fantastic, very creative and a damned hard worker. Every day he drags his easel, paints, sharpie, markers and his bag of goodies to a different NYC location and works his butt off drawing first with the sharpie markers then painting. Enrico Miguel Thomas is the only artist I've ever seen to begin with markers instead of pencils. His works shows movement and he paints the entire day then retires to his studio where he finishes his works, perfecting their balance.


Below are some photos I took of Enrico working on the Burberry Building in NYC.

Here are some of Enrico Miguel Thomas' links to learn more.

A Sharpie Ad Thomas features in:

http://www.nobodyslooking.com/17183/679146/gallery/sharpie-enrico-miguel-thomas

Written up in The New York Times!

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/after-an-artist-steps-away-from-his-bag-a-summons-and-a-legal-battle/

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/artist-uses-the-subway-as-subject-and-canvas/

Other publications:

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/subway_artist_battles_the_mta_for_right_to_make_art_partner/

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/enrico-thomas.html

Thomas' websites:

http://www.EnricoMiguelThomas.net

http://emtart.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/the-immense-power-of-art-can-get-you-anything/

Scents of Delight

You smell as sweet as a mango that I delay eating so I can smell it all day long. At night, I bite the skin, pull a strip back, and run my tongue and teeth across the mango pulp. I don’t want to take that first bite because I want to smell that sweet fruit all day long. Let’s pretend we’re falling in love. Look deep into my eyes and be hypnotized by your eyes reflected in mine. Memorize the details of each scenario beginning with our first electrified touch, following through with flirtatious flow, slow emphasis on each word describing our desires. Our first attempts at lovemaking begin in my mind.

Peace Prayer

Need alone down time to survive threatening circumstances

Need to listen to the hurt, hear the cries

Regrets I try to forget to leave behind

I turned a blind eye to the answer

vow to leave doubt out of the question to my answer

lies survive my lips deny my heart fears a mishap on the horizon

An angel forsaking our great nation on the verge of denial

Does Gehinnom exist - a Jew’s purgatory

Refuse to accommodate doubts about heaven or hell: Gehinnom

Intensification exists without doubt

Fingertips feel my heartbeat with passion

the sensation alive in my drive

Pain sears through my womb pain,

rips my soul from a concentration camp

Arrive at a better nation based on the assumption

That they do what they want to and we do what we’re told

Secrets we hold near, they hurt but they stay there

I deny what we live through

live outside my head in the grip of a constant illusion

hear my conversations that never occur

I survive the delusion I live inside my head

the rich imaginings of what was said and never was or will be

die and I never said what I meant to say to you and now I never will

the pain never stops

I keep moving my feet to a beat only I hear, 
I try to help someone hear,

please hear but no one hears but me

Standing alone in a grim bleak reality, coming and going alone

Solutions flash by and are slashed off by reality as 

I follow the path of Dorothy unafraid of what proceeds me, lays in wait 

in a roughened bush burning by the side of an elegant brook 

in forest of deceit I wander hearing innocent animals slaughtered 

the cries calling out in my head instead 

of a reality frozen in a time frame 

waiting for a way out of the underflow 

I call to every passer by I see

Please, I beg, a hand please, I beg you don’t hurt me 

I’m only a first time offender 

I didn’t mean to raise my hand, 

absolution for the abortion, 

please stop the pollution, 

I hear the cries of an ancient race of animals now all dead, 

there’s no more of them to kill, only a lab created animal exists 

Please father, a benediction before I go and leave this universe

Can you give me a calculation of where you think I’ll be

Father I have sinned, 10 hail Mary’s and go your way and sin no more 

I promise, father I have sinned

Afraid there’s another life waiting somewhere to find me 

Explore, seeking to find my way out of mischief into
a glance of an inner richer universe

no exsanguination please

Try not to cry but the tears build in my eyes betray me

Water builds but doesn’t flow, yet you see me

I explode into another me who is she? 

I don’t know 

I didn’t make her 

she is me there bubbling beneath the blood 

warm ready to burst forth in flames fires 

burst forth from my mouth like a dragon breathing fire I

explode into a new me

once more a reinvention of who I want to be

I Need My Words

Need to see words hand written,

Need words typed in neat clean letters

Words born disappear like a sunrise mist

Gone by midmorning

Daily a fight ensues to restore my words to memory

Words stain my brain like berries stain my fingertips

Faces and names get easier than specific word recall

Lose track of adjectives, verbs, and adverbs

Nouns and verbs stream by my consciousness steamed by battle

Articles circumvent examination, addled

Words flee from my lips

Escaping interjections and prepositions

Frustration when words get away,

Write words down, use pen and microsoft

Pray to revive lost words,

absorption in proper punctuation, grammar,

Avariciously use pen, paper, and computer

Develop vocabulary, learn pronunciation

Ravenously, like a wolf, write words, devour words,

Believe words, hoard words are me,

Words deliver, create lust; rousts self-criticism, spreads similar views,

Words are abused and used

Words create desires; produce peace and love,

Words are seeds; words flower they flourish,

Grow out of control

Write words carefully, choose words 

Ardently respect word power

Words race around my mind
surround me like vagabonds searching warmth and nourishment

Contemplate obscure, little known meanings

Scrutinize each word’s effect

Each word opens spaces, new places

Each word provides sensitivity to pain and pleasure,

Stretches mental capacity

Words read and said exist, disappear like wind at sunset

Words written, never read, disintegrate like carapace

Write words, fear I’ll lose them if I don’t write and say them

Read written words aloud, hear their sounds

Word clouds form above my head like Lil’ Abner

Greedily read words, lap words up from books and cyberspace

Over passing seasons

Words capture a moment in eternity

Missouri Review mentioned me as a great woman writer to read!

Writers are especially sensitive creatures even if we do wear tough armour to protect ourselves. I'm no different than most of us writers in that way. My ego also comes into play on occasion, so recently when I checked to see where I'd been mentioned lately on Google, I was not only flabbergasted, but honored, to be listed in the article below by Alison Balaskovits. Something like this makes all my effort seem worth it. Thank you to the Missouri Review, and to Ms. Balaskovits, for noticing and mentioning me. 

I've Got The Blues For Paper

I’ve got the blues about paper today. I walk around my house examining notes, short stories, papers from high school written in long hand, looking through papers to throw away, thinking about days long gone when we learned to write script.

My mind jumps ahead: future generations where no one will know how to write script. Writing by hand will disappear except for a few who carry on. Handwriting will become a fine transcribed art that no one teaches and that no one knows how to do anymore.

Later, my cabdriver explains how now-a-days, children do their assignments online on the computer so they don’t write anything down at all anymore not like we did back in the day. He said they barely learn print, they type everything on the computer.

Columbia forced me to buy a typewriter in 1978. They said hand written assignments get get lower grades. Hasn’t anyone explained this to you before? I mean I ‘m sorry to break it down to you like this and feel bad no one told you before that at Columbia. Miz. Leftow, you already lost one grade this term by handing in hand-written homework. You would have gotten a B+ but because it was hand written you only are due a C+. Sorry…

When I explained how poor I was, she said, “You’re smart, you’re here at Columbia so you’ll figure out a way to survive.”

Back then all I had was two pairs of jeans a skirt a few blouses and one sweater from the $10 store. I had no money to spend but needed that typewriter. Back then I couldn’t conceive a typewriter had a memory so you wouldn’t have to typewrite the whole page if you made a mistake.

My cabbies' conversation brings me back. He’s telling me how hard it is to get by with four children, two are teenagers. The only way they get by is because his wife lies and says he doesn’t live there so she can get food stamps Medicaid and section 8, he said as he drove his Lincoln Town Car working paying for High-Class radio service trying to make a buck. It ain’t easy out here and that rent we pay would cost us 2100 instead of the 900 we pay and in this way, we get by he confided.

Four children and us and two cats. I show the vet our Medicaid card he continued and then we don’t pay. Medicaid for cats is good he said. We’re doing the best we can to get by and she works on the side too. My wife’s a certified home health nursing aide and she gets work a few days a week at a hospital up in the Bronx. After they take out the taxes it’s about 50 bucks for a 12-hour day then she got to make sure it doesn’t get in the way of watching out for our children so thank God she doesn’t work every day.

It gives her time off to cook and clean the house and watch over our teens and younger children. We pay for catholic school – and they have to go to college. There’s no jobs out there you know. We try to get by – but it’s hard to qualify. That’s why she wants to work too. She works off the books. There’s just too many bills to pay. You know growing children need clothes and shoes - those are expensive.

It’s a different world out there. My cabby alerts me that the ride and story have come to an end.

They don’t do things the way they used to. My cabbie is a young man. He’s only 42. His radio comes alive. A voice asks his location in Spanish.

It’s a lot to chew on. I think about all the finagling I did to get by twenty-two years working professionally to help our young – a noble job made harder by the huge bureaucracy I functioned in.

I enter my apartment and look around me again at all the paper I’d been trying to separate earlier into throw away and keep. Notes and each piece of paper seem to have so much meaning I don’t know how to throw them out.

In Washington Heights where I live most of the people survive on a lie because otherwise, they’d be too poor, unable to survive, pay their rent, to take care of their children’s needs plus pay medical expenses. In order to qualify for government programs, my cabbie’s wife promises government agencies to sue him for child support if he can be found. He lives with her and pays for the children to attend Catholic School. They lie to get by or go live on the street. Life has become a double whammy, like Yossarian in Catch 22, where no matter what you do, you fight a losing battle.

Uh uh, I worked hard for that money, and can’t get me no, no, no, no – satisfaction!


Note:* 
This story was re-edited & rewritten because the original format was half poetry, half narrative. I tried to make it all fit as one piece. If anyone has read the other piece or cares to search for it, I'd appreciate any comments as to which piece you prefer.