It’s an honor to appear in the wonderful anthology, This is What America Looks Like, a true labor of love curated and published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House (a 47-year-old cooperative, all-volunteer press based in the nation’s capital). Much more about the anthology, here. A special reading, sponsored by 1455, took place last winter to celebrate the book’s launch — video, below (my reading is at 25:41, but I encourage you to check out the entire program!).
South Loudoun Street, After Midnight, Tonight
Competing scents settle for a stalemate—undecided
about what’s happening and what already happened.
Old mothers wearing slippers in the summer with
cigarettes like extra limbs, expunging stale smoke
into dying air already appropriate for a screenplay.
Scattered trash defiant and strewn across lawns
no longer useful indoors but neither noteworthy
nor consigned, just yet, to the recycling bin.
Warped wood embarrassed by itself, unable to keep up
appearances: it broils during the day and at night the rot
soaks in, settling like caked make-up on an ancient face.
Invisible men search out invisible women while invisible cats
stalk invisible prey beneath fraying clotheslines burdened by
half-soaked bedsheets, waiting for either rain or an intervention.
Street soldiers without homes patrol the sum total of places
they’re neither welcomed nor noticed, mutely content allowing
their minds to pull strings as part of a play that writes itself.
Veterans of the alleys and shadows amble or else wheel
themselves in and out of corners, their hearts preserving
what their memories can no longer make any sense of.
Businesses out of business for lack of business insist
it’s nobody’s business, and the dying animals that keep
other things alive wonder if their sacrifice is in vain.
Nothing to see, nothing to sell, nothing to steal, nowhere else
to go: if this pavement could talk it would and it does—but
it’ll take a few news cycles before we know what it’s saying.
Streetlights tired of pleading the fifth simply refuse to
shine, and let things unfold the way they do in the wild.
