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.