- 7 days ago
- 1 min read
CITI BIKE
Miami, FL
It cost $9.10 for an hour in the new year.
Downtown at the waterfront park
along the bascule bridges and cargo ships.
Where I practiced my left and right turns,
circling around palm trees in smooth, tight whirls.
My life far from the job I had lined up in New York
and all the loose ends before it, sitting like these tall,
empty apartments, built by private equity firms,
waiting to mean something more.
When my call with the VP got rescheduled,
I took another lap around the bay-green field
until the planets rose to cross the sky
and my friends left for the west coast
and the time I paid for finally ran out.
GRACE Q. SONG is a Chinese-American writer based in New York City. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Gigantic Sequins, Sixth Finch, The Boiler, The Offing, The Cincinnati Review, The Minnesota Review, North American Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She majored in English at Columbia University, where she received the 2025 Academy of American Poets Prize. Currently, she works as an investment banking analyst.