The Literary Review
- Swipe Down
Austin Alexis Featured Poet
Issue 10 Page 1
- Swipe Left
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.