Thursday, August 31, 2023: John Grey's "In Greenwich Village"
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review, and Sheepshead Review. Latest books, Between Two Fires , Covert , and Memory Outside The Head , are available through Amazon. Grey has work forthcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, and California Quarterly . In Greenwich Village Away from grid smoke and subway rumble, I find chess players in Washington Square, bongo players drumming up a beat I first heard many years ago, a guy strumming a guitar with cap at his feet, and pigeons… so many pigeons, so much pigeon droppings. I drink coffee in a downstairs cafĂ©, nibble the glaze off a stale donut, look around at the clientele, aging bohemians mostly, paying for java out of their social security checks. Then I stroll the narrow streets, am constantly reminded how far the world has come from this neighborhood’s heyday. The last record store is boarded up. The bookstore window offers Marxist tracts dirt chea...