A few years ago I lived in Brooklyn on 22nd street. When I stepped out onto my front porch and looked past the DEAD END sign and beyond that... past END, I could just see the hint of a derelict ship docked under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, shoved between parked commuter cars, cranes and warehouses. Patches of yellow ochre tarnished her hull in rings. She stood draped in heavy wires and rope, and this made her seem to list slightly starboard. The name, "Panama," was peeling on her bow. I imagined at one time she had dragged her oily cargo, stored in rows of metal tanks across her deck, through the gulf and along the Atlantic seaboard into the murky Gowanas Canal. Now as cars whizzed overhead along the BQE and tiny oysters sucked at her bottom, she rocked silently, left here to rot in these foreign waters.
2010, 21" x 27" Acrylic on panel
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