I’ve had a love affair with this city. Since I fell into its arms, I have been enamored with the buxom curves of the village, the metabolism of midtown, the reticence of the Upper East Side, the pregnancy of Harlem. Walking down the street, I fall for every Korean laundromat, for every Ray’s Pizza, for each old sneaker hanging over a Brooklyn telephone wire.

The city flirts with me, her taxi-cab hips swinging from East to West Side. She plays hard to get stop ups with the Six Train and Puerto Rican Day parades. I wonder what she sees in me.

Bejeweled with the docile Brooklyn Bridge and the angular GW, New York is dressed to the nines. Strutting on high heels of Manhattan, she is drunk with attention.

New York City is a constantly shifting painting on a cement canvas that wears a seasonal mood ring. In winter, she’s bruised and bitter with tourists, her local immune system shielding grimaces. In summer, she sweats only the faithful who can’t bear to see her lonely.

Her Six Train bloodstream pumps wisdom, preaching not to look twice at the matted-hair man screaming at his knee. I sit on blue benches with those equally obsessed, indulging in the quiet comfort of the bum on the stoop of Saint Catherine’s Church.

Dressed in Starbucks and cigarettes, sun hits her skyscraper shoulders. She is freckled with suits. Brooklyn, her conscience; Soho, her fingers; Queens, her love handles; downtown, her wrinkles