Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One Nov-Dec 2026.
The Edge by Sally Breen.
‘I need to get some hobbies I’ve just been so tired.’
(woman walking in New York with her friends)
I still can’t really see my old friend as a woman, and this is my fault. She’s gone body digital and I’m still analogue. Video tape curling too tight against the unravelling she’s already done. She says you never really realise how weird you’ve become until you contemplate living somewhere other than New York. And I get that. But in the post pandemic world New York doesn’t seem all that progressive or weird, New York just smells of money. Too old school, too steel blue stacked in the winter light, narrow strip of Manhattan, overburdened by promise. Pale brown gouge of Hudson rolling on, not making any sounds.
The High Line dotted with signs to explain why nothing is growing and why they don’t cut back the dead bits in winter or clean the leaf litter to make things pretty because creatures make homes in the dead bits, they say, things are regenerating, in the flat dry, in the spindly grey, but I can’t see much of anything living so I keep on walking, on the miles, locals talking too loud, tourists going too slow, feeling underwhelmed, gawking into apartments not covered by reflective or tinted glass, looking for something, an animal, a human scratching around.
Far away between the slits in the brown bricks I see a rainbow portrait of Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo and it makes up for the flowers that aren’t growing, and I try not to think too much about the people in the apartments who tint their windows so they can look at us but we can’t look at them, and the ones who don’t tint seem even stranger. I guess everything is worth a lot. I go all the way to the end.
I go a hundred floors up, to the Edge, the tallest building in New York, the bigness cancelling everything out and I lay down like everyone else on the squares of glass and take a selfie, the city underneath me and I’m scared the glass is gonna give way and I’ll fall into the pointy eyed buildings. I don’t look good in the picture. I look terrified. But the glass holds, and nothing happens, and I feel empty because they’ve turned the falling man into an Instagram story, strangers grinning, trying hard not to make the connection but making it anyway, thinking about how long the fall would have taken. I don’t buy anything. Monogrammed socks, cups, t-shirts. In the elevator they simulate us flying through the city, as if we’re Transformers or Spider Men in a way that’s cool and better than The Edge but also kitsch so the Japanese couple and the family from New Jersey and I laugh. And all anyone wants to do is get out.
In New York I keep dreaming of the sea. Big island home in the Pacific, not far from smaller islands where the water is rising too fast where a mother might dress a boy as a girl. Not as a transgression but as a choice. Concrete not the only thing that provides us with permission. Stuck in the hotel, in the steel currency without a current I go to a cement island, a fairy tale of man-made tulips, huge and forlorn. I go up and around the neat paths, the manicured gardens, the bad sculptures, past Mexican men being paid to mulch, to make the dead bits grow, in the flat dry, in the spindly grey. And I can hear birds calling on the docks, but I can’t see them.
I watch Tides on the plane, burning a fossil fuel trail and in the film the earth is watery and not the iridescent ocean I know, the ocean is flat and tepid and soaking grey and when the tides rise twice a day there’s nothing left to do but float.
When I land, the dark mass of cloud doesn’t read like a warning, even when the English tourists start groaning or when I’m in the carpark and fail to register the wall of sound coming at me is lots of water. I don’t realise how much water there is until I try to drive in the blackness down the late-night highway, my car lifting and aquaplaning, and every other streetlight is down and floating away and I know I’m back on the plane, I am in Tides where very few of us survive, and this is no longer about the good times.
© Sally Breen
Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Griffith University and Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) Sally Breen is the author of grunge memoir The Casuals and the neo-noir novel Atomic City. Her short form work has been published widely www.sallybreen.com.au