••• Remember: The Tribeca Family Festival is this Saturday on Greenwich. (Stock up on earplugs, nearby residents.) Be sure to search out and support the local businesses!

••• “I heard a rumor that the City sold 250 Church and the developer is putting up a 50-story building,” emails N. “True?” I don’t know. I wasn’t able to confirm it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the owner (the city is just a tenant) had plans to do something there. (Why else screw over your own son? Update: Lawsuit dropped.) Whether it can get to 50 stories is another question; the adjacent buildings aren’t very big, and so presumably don’t have many air rights to sell. Or is that not how it works? No matter what, one hopes the buyers on north side of 56  Leonard did their due diligence….

••• Clever signage at the Housing Works Thrift Shop on Chambers. (There are more like it.)

••• Here’s a peek inside the new Mmuseumm 2, a couple doors down from Mmuseumm.

••• Poem in Your Pocket Day is Thursday, April 30. The Poets House website has poem cards you can print to hand out. Or you could always print this one; like most poems, it wants to be read out loud.

Getting It Right
by Matthew Dickman

Your ankles make me want to party,
want to sit and beg and roll over
under a pair of riding boots with your ankles
hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather,
they make me wish it was my birthday
so I could blow out their candles, have them hung
over my shoulders like two bags
full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines
but smaller and lighter and sexier
than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge;
they make me want to sing, make me
want to take them home and feed them pasta,
I want to punish them for being bad
And then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling,
It will never happen again, not
In a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be
Hurled into the air like a cannonball
And pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van.
Your thighs are two boats burned out
of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them
under the blue denim of your high-end jeans,
could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry.
Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas,
a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once
when I was falling in love with hills.
Your ass is a string quartet,
the northern lights tucked tightly into bed
between the high-count-of-cotton sheets.
Your back is the back of a river full of fish;
I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word.
Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone,
a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back
like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine
is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions.
When I place my fingers along it there isn’t an instrument in the world
I’d rather be playing. It’s a map of the world, a time line,
I am navigating the North and South of it.
Your armpits are beehives; they make me want
to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey,
their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark.
Your arms are the arms of nations; they hail me like a cab.
I am bright yellow for them.
I am always thinking about them,
resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms
of blue and ice with the blood running
through them. Close enough to your shoulders
to make them believe in God. Your shoulders
make me want to raise an army and burn down the Capitol. They sing
to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse.
each is a separate bowl of rice
steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck
is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet
and a throaty elevator
made of light. Your neck
is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven.
It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything
worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth,
which opens like the legs of astronauts
who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one
voting districts of the Milky Way.
Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right!