The Lights Go Down at the Angelika

and you press into the dark, imagine the stranger two rows back, that fragile chance you’ll forget in the second trailer. Now it’s quiet, still this burden of being watcher and screen and what floats across it–light pouring out its time and necklines and train wrecks. What a relief to yield to the EXIT sign red “I” blinking like a candle. Soon the enormous figures moving across rooms, the emphatic narrative arcs. (There’s the thrum of the subway, its engine of extras.) Here now the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets with brown-bag faces and fringy hair. You’re almost here. But what you want is the after. How yourself you are now walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street, at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow mums. Here you are: Woman with Cilantro listening to the rattle of the wrap, the paper sound paper makes after you have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples. Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.