It’s Not the “60s Anymore

Our favorite stores are shuttered. / Our hip fashions are vintage.

’60s montage: Bruce_Crandall’s_UH-1D.jpg: US Army The_Beatles_in_America.JPG: United Press International, photographer unknownKennedyb.jpg: Victor Hugo King Martin_Luther_King_-_March_on_Washington.jpg: Unknown? Woodstock_redmond_stage.JPG: Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell Mao Zedong in 1963 (cropped).jpg: неизвестный (unknown) Stonewall_Inn_1969.jpg: Diana Davies, copyright owned by New York Public Library NASA_AS-11–40–5875.jpg: Neil A. Armstrong derivative work: CatJar at en.wikipedia — jpg 659 × 892 jpg 2,349 × 2,365 jpg 800 × 557 JPG 3,578 × 2,526 jpg 3,636 × 2,429 jpg 1,296 × 1,403 JPG 700 × 480under GFDL

“I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of “coffee shops” as they were defined in New York — cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.” Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and ’70s

Dear Zorch,

No ~

It’s not the sixties anymore.

It is a decade of upheaval and

people inflamed and lands laid bare.

Sea levels are rising and refugees are lost.

Once you jockeyed in suits and ties

while I sat pregnant with poems, just seventeen,

the most unhappening girl in New York,

that most happening town.

We never did walk The Village streets for

sips of espresso in eccentric cafés, places