UNION SQUARE

Union Square

The bidding war over empty restaurants’
begun. Where oblivion bared her breasts
& milk bar crossed the street, sanctimonious,
the hiss of frying dumplings.
Two orthogonal trees parlay shade,
each wearing microscopic tattoos.

Neon motes around the square,
the too-many of us drifting into bars
where the topless places have flown upstairs,
au revoir at midafternoon.
Claptrap novelties spill through fingers
aching with the sense of not enough.

The climate clock perishes us around 4 pm
but the green market offers magic pumpkins
mushroom pickle, ramps, honey & sheer balsamic
which forge an alliance, lustful & snapdragon yellow,
underbrush of struggling gnats.

In vain, July’s pigeons are necklaced copper & eglantine.
Elsewhere, the hour presents wrought iron tables
under flirtatious wisteria. Hollow ceramic cats of China
philosophically feign their ersatz mysteries.
Leftover slattern pies, apple or peach,
nest in juice. Can it be too late? What about now?

Also: season of Aedes aegypti
snarking for subtropical, bare-legged zones.
Also: insecure balconies, beheaded blooms
lashing blood over the pavement’s
bodies in umwelt, fresh or sour.

Supper will be praise for dimpled strawberries,
for the sole that came before, that we eat
at our own table, which is usually. A trickle of talk.
Once you lived right off the square,
dreamed last night you’d misplaced keys
so had to pick the lock, startling an enormous roach.

Three Breakdowns on I-95

Nothing besides to chronicle.
Just the earthy whiff, eternal roadwork with orange cones,
their sequence a familiar DNA.
Land stripped of death & decay, scrub oak miserable,
low-hanging branches sheared. Redwing with subscript tangerine.

Ruddy gold pinpoints. The woodchuck, imaging ordinary tedium.
In German, a man covets my window seat.
Because I. Now over the wheel, jounced, so doused in gloom.
An axle comes off, narrowly.

. . . . . .

At the rest stop, we smell meat in rancid oil.
What about the moon, sadly underfed? Whose lives
are rearranged when the portal cannot open
way past dark, New England wintry?

Kissing couple. A harrier bird built of owl & hawk.
The genus Circus! How haunted by the many lost habitats—
must look up the etymology, once out of this almost-wreck.
Pocket lint, no pen. A disappointing peppermint.

. . . . . .

Fresh malfunctions. Dawn’s brittle cusp,
dim cumulus conclave. Licking our dry lips drier.
Any algorithm for this salty input? Marshes past.

All said, birds are most fluent. Statistical impossibility
of a third breakdown. What forfeit, the missed funeral
& never a stone angel? Our faith’s unconfident about heaven,
more certain of a lavish earthly spread. Bread of affliction must wait.
The exit signs, that mesmerizing black macadam,
my journey, faintly underworld, is winding down.

Carol Alexander co-edited the award-winning anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice. She is the author of the poetry collections Blue Vivarium, Fever and Bone, Environments, Habitat Lost, and the chapbook Bridal Veil Falls. Work appears in print in Asheville Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Free State Review, Mudlark, New World Writing, RHINO Poetry and other journals. Links to some of her poems featured online can be found at Verse Daily.