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a journal of literature & art

The Literary Review

Austin Alexis                    Featured Poet 

Issue 10              Page 1

Aftermath

The lady who lived in apartment # 13

never used to speak to me.

Then, one random week,

she started asking me

how I was doing

whenever she spotted me.

Later, I was to hear

from another neighbor’s derailed voice

that the woman in apartment 13

was taken to death by a brain tumor.

I should have solemnly sensed

some element was amiss,

a mist fogging the hallway

where we used to see one another.

I should have been the one

to combine courtesy with curiosity,

and a dose of compassion.

Now she has gone

before I was the first to inquire

how her days were going,

whether the globe was turning

too quickly and erratically for her,

whether she needed someone, anyone,

to ask about her health.

To Broome Street

Listen, Mr. Broome Street:

are you going to belong

to the Lower East Side or NoLiTa

or fancy-pants Soho?

Decide, oh narrow one,

snaking your way east-west,

west-east, spreading your horizontal

with some of your doors held open

by thighbone-big stones

during balmy summer afternoons.

Will you give yourself to sightseers

or to locals who gaze at you fondly,

the way they regard a pizzeria they love

that’s been part of the neighborhood’s heart

longer than Broadway was a trail

for on-the-move Native Americans?

Take a firm position.

Oh Broome Street, oh quaint one,

will you conform to the latest fashions

or will you stick around as you are–

for a while, at least?

Decide.

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.

Lighting Fixture

Months later, after the glass fixture

catapulted to the parquet floor,

crashing into three thousand pieces,

I’m still finding its fragments

under the desk,

behind the file cabinet,

among knickknacks atop the bookcase.

Stray memories of a friendship

that has cracked,

     shattered,

                   lunged into a zone

where its parts summersaulted

beyond the grip of hands and fingers

that were cut by it

as they reached out

to break its plunge.

Encountering a Friend

Merely a few weeks before you died

I spotted you

heading for subway steps,

the staircase just ten feet ahead.

Your frightened expression foretold

the shortness of your life.  

Your stooped posture prefigured

your death’s unfairness.

We waved at each other,

not wanting to stop and talk,

not choosing to come face to face

with what we were already facing,

as we hurriedly passed by one another.

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