10-Gallery on Rivington

Art gallery that survives the eyes

of roaming homeless men,

of uptown hipsters,

of dallying downtown yuppies,

of midnight rodents at its doorframe slab.

That Rivington Street gallery with its slight

mournful echoes echoing tourists’ steps,

its processional horizontal aisle,  

its recessed level like a glamorous Hades.

Art gallery nestled between a bodega

and a store too nondescript to label, 

across a narrow motorway from a barbershop

too state-of -the-art for the tenement it’s housed in.

That Rivington Street gallery of dried-paint odors

and staff sitting in prim melancholy

and Bowery flies flying at the shadowed window

and drawings snug in bikini-skimpy frames

hanging on walls loud with muteness

adjacent to sculptures that rumble ceramic quiet

and that collect dust silent as rats.