MEMORY BANK
Pork sausages in butcher’s paper –
is that your memory?
It is mine.
Friday was my mother’s after-work
shopping night.
First, the Cash and Carry.
Then the baker’s.
Finally, the butcher shop
with its sawdust floor,
and Dick the Butcher
in black-and-white-striped smock.
I hid behind her,
couldn’t bear the sight of pig corpses
hung from hooks,
or the grind of the sausage machine,
or the slap of raw fatty meat
on a blood-stained bench.
You tell me
it was nothing like that
in your childhood.
Every slice of meat
was clean, packaged, refrigerated.
To your young mind,
there were no slaughtered
animals involved.
And you had parents,
two of them,
who sometimes sat you
in their shopping cart,
and wheeled you down the aisles.
And a car in the parking lot besides.
My mother and I always took a cab home.
The driver stuffed the parcels
in the trunk.
We sat silently in the back seat.
It was a quiet good enough for a funeral.
Pork sausages in butcher’s paper –
it was a funeral.
THE HIT
I was surly.
I was argumentative.
So I took the hit.
No warning.
Just somebody’s fist out of nowhere.
Everything started to tilt.
First one way. Then the other.
Standing was suddenly beyond me.
So I let go. All of it.
People, family, the lousy jobs,
the sour love life,
even the sorry excuse of myself
I kept dragging around.
My legs shot off like
they had somewhere else to be.
My head spun the other way.
And the rest of me hit the ground
with an almighty thump.
I didn’t move. The dust settled.
The pain slowly quit.
No big deal.
I started liking it down there.
It became a second home to me,
in that promised land
below the stampede of shoes,
the forest of legs,
the sagging bellies and swinging arms,
the whole human zoo stomping past.
People tried to pull me up,
voices coming from every direction,
but I’d already started spinning again,
right there on the floor.
It was safe enough.
You can’t fall any farther
when the ground has already claimed you.
And for once,
I was out of reach of the one asshole
who’d always done the most damage -
me.
AUGUST IN THE CITY
It’s mid-August.
almost 10 p.m.
And uncomfortably humid.
The darkness doesn’t cool a thing.
It’s just an extra sticky layer
on top of what the day left behind.
Of course, I can’t sleep.
So I get up,
open every window wide.
That’s a useless undertaking.
More steamy air moves in
to my apartment uninvited.
Down below a drunk stumbles home.
He’s oblivious to everything.
I’m jealous
Come back to bed
says a voice in the background.
How soft, how persuasive it sounds.
But I live alone.
It’s just the heat talking.
And it’s trying to get fresh.
RODENT POPULATION
Rats are roaming,
anywhere, everywhere,
with many other rats for company.
Noses, feet,
find their way
from rough nest
into the thin, scattered lights
of late night in the city.
It is true they’ve no idea
how feral they are,
what native wildlife
they drive out or devour,
what diseases they spread,
the kind of shudder they send
up the backbones
of humans who come across them.
They scurry in and out
of cracks in the wall
or scramble
up and down drainpipes,
ransack the dumpsters,
the trashcans,
even break into apartments,
snaffle up the crumbs.
And you can’t take your eyes
off these little night‑shift hustlers.
They are doing what they were born to do.
And that’s just like the rest of us.
A rat pauses.
It black eye catches the streetlamp glow.
For a second,
you see yourself in that twitching shape.
It’s just a creature trying to make it.
You know the feeling.
JUST THE WAY YOU ARE WILL DO
You deny your own beauty.
There’s a barrier of hostility
between the mirror and your face.
That’s why the comb
almost tears out the hair.
And the lipstick
smothers those lips.
The air between
yourself and your reflection
is like a charged fence.
Stupid me,
barging in
and touching it.
