Sy Safransky

Two Dollars An Hour

On my first day at the book warehouse, D., the boss, is complaining of sore muscles and a bad headache. Baseball on Saturday, drinking with the boys on Sunday. “I done indulged too much,” he says wearily. His manner is relaxed and friendly.

[Her face was beaten and bloody]

Reflection

All The Difference

Money

Money, or, as Karl Marx’s mother puts it, “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it . . . it would have been much better.”

From The Kitchen

Become A Friend Of The SUN

Sy’s New York Diary: Amazing Flesh

I read, in the newspaper, about a man who is dragged from his car, knifed repeatedly for the few dollars in his wallet, and left bleeding in the gutter. My mother says her friends don’t go out at night. It’s an old story, old as the city’s tired and dour expression, old as the dry and wrinkled hands of a man trying to remember better days and remembering nothing but bone.

The Nothing Poems

Chewing It Over

Yom Kippur. The Jewish Day of Atonement. Along with my family, I used to fast, on this holy day, to expiate my sins, to assure that God would mercifully grant me yet one more year, during which, along with my family, I might sit every night before the TV, eating enough fruit and cookies to feed the whole block.