No News Today - Guest Post - Sarah Dohrmann

Our needs rage on like a neglected fire. My needs, your needs, the cashier's needs, the teacher's needs, our parents' needs, the kids' needs. On and on, our hungry need. Today on the subway in the Bronx, folks called each other nasty names because somebody demanded a seat and somebody pushed somebody and somebody else looked at somebody funny and Hey! Somebody here needs to get his ass to work!

Needs. Oh to be the little dog that lives above me. As I sit here at my desk I can hear his mommy climbing the building stairs, calling, "Is that Boo Boo? Boo Boo? Is Boo Boo going to greet me?" She starts this game when she gets to the second floor; she lives on the third. All the way up the stairs she's calling Boo Boo's name and damned if I don't hear Boo Boo's claws make contact onto the hardwood floor above me. I imagine he's been having himself a skittish Boo Boo nap at the very moment he heard the distant call of "Boo Boo! Boo Boo!" The door is opened by a key. "Ah! It's Boo Boo! Oh my gosh, Boo Boo!" squeals Mommy. She lifts him, his tail scissors, he licks up a glorious gulp of need.

In Brooklyn there's no space on the train. Most of us want to sit, but we don't need to sit, not really. And the guy who won't move his belongings from the seat next to him knows the difference between our want and our need; he couldn't give a rat's ass about either. This makes want elevate to the rank of need, that fire. I mean, the motherfucker hasn't even bothered to look up from his book to see if I need.

Sarah Dohrmann has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship of the Arts for Creative Writing in Morocco. With photographer Tiana Markova-Gold, Sarah won the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Work from their photography/writing collaboration has been featured in The British Journal of Photography and excerpted in TIME Magazine's LightBox. Sarah has written feature work, travel writing, cultural commentary, short stories and essays for Glamour, Poets & Writers, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Bad Idea (England), and The Iowa Review, among others. She is a member of the text and jazz ensemble FlashPoint NYC. Her current and anticipated work is a book of literary journalism titled Lost Girls that concerns the lives of prostituted women in Morocco. You can read more of her work on her blog, Und You Vill Like It.