From a bartender in the East Village

by Kat Beyer

I used to live under the ocean. I was there for about a week. The rent’s okay, the girls are cute even if they have fins, but there’s no coffee. I had gotten into that poem by T. S. Eliot, you know, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” So I moved. But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The thing about lobsters and other ragged claw types is, they’re not very intellectual. You’re better off talking to the starfish.