Skip to content →

Pilgrimage

How often I’ve leafed down Broadway, my face half hidden

& found the night to be another failed suture—

seven miles of heel touching heel, scar cleaning scar,

as the wind frisks my hands for crumbs. I have loved this city

in ways imaginable, learned not to speak when speaking,

to scry its palms. Yet too soon the gulls slit

the borrowed night into a thin blue ether: the blank pages

of a journal forgotten—the middle chapter,

our ghosts. I was safe as a quelled dream in the dark.

from Bicycle in A Ransacked City: An ElegyFind more by Andrés Cerpa at the library

Copyright © 2019 Andrés Cerpa
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

Published in Andrés Cerpa Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this (publication, website, exhibit, etc.) do not necessarily represent those of the Idaho Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.