Voila! The mysterious reproductive habits of the to-go cup, at last caught on film.

Payphones form part of that reef of obsolescence that defines the modern city. The cups, deposited as planulae, grow upon them like coral polyps.

Pedestrians (fig. 2) are the drifting milt of the city. Payphone-reefs accrete their detritus (fig. 3).

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Each cup has a residue and a story: the bite radius of the lipstick along the edge of the top, the chewed end of a straw, the grease smudging a logo. Maybe, if I could pry those phones open, and the coins all spilled out Vegas-style, each coin, like each cup, would tell a story, speak a desire, like the coins thrown into a well, or its aftermath, like the ones dropped into a beggar’s cup.