Poem of the Week | August 10, 2026

Mike Carlson is the author of Tips to Help You Do Your Best, published in 2025 by Tupelo Press. His first collection of poems, Cement Guitar, was awarded the Juniper Prize. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Gulf Coast, New Letters, Seneca Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is a teacher at P.S. 107 in Brooklyn.

“Anonymous Report of Unsafe Conditions” by Mike Carlson is our Poem of the Week.

***

Anonymous Report of Unsafe Conditions

What is true about New York is that
your bike will be stolen.
Decent apples cost too much.
Anyone might write a song.
Mist works differently
after it hits the traffic lights
on the most desolate part of Flatbush Avenue
with the box elders on one side
and the rest of your day on the other.
You can turn onto Prospect Park West
and see old snow against the trees
in late summer and then see film trucks and realize
it’s only piles of cotton
with dead leaves in them set down
to embody the despair of early February.
You can be entirely wrong.
Oblivion is almost a requirement. Old men leafing
through catalogs for wildflowers
will never know that their community garden
was once a gas station where a puppeteer
was killed. In the city, days themselves
can be monsters, but seasons usually stop
long enough for us to acknowledge
the beauty of a sunfish being devoured by yellowjackets
on the sidewalk in front of the German
preschool. Everything we do
is done at our own peril: taking the bus
an extra stop to see the ruined mural, walking
ten blocks to find that even our least favorite pharmacy
no longer carries our brand of toothpaste.
In the movies, you call the police
and they say you have to go twenty-four hours
without seeing a person before
they’re officially missing. In New York,
they’re gone. They’re missing right now.
They stay that way.

***

Author’s Note

Eighteen years ago, I left work to find that my bike had been stolen. It was a bike I’d had since the eighth grade and had bought with money from my first job as a busboy. My girlfriend, now wife, asked me where my bike was, and I said something like, “I don’t know. I guess someone stole it.” I think my matter-of-factness really impressed her. It was the closest I’ve ever come to acting like the protagonist from a Camus novel. In any case, I wrote the first line of this poem a few years ago, and then kept adding and subtracting facts and images until I felt like I had something that Milton Glaser (the designer of the I ♥️ NY logo) might smile at if he saw it scribbled on a napkin in the back of a taxi. New York City is incessantly surprising and heartbreakingly dependable. I’m always trying to put my finger on what it is about the precarious balance of pros and cons that compels me to live here.