Elegy for Avenue B

Sheila Black

 

Even the trees had jaundice
that winter—waistlines thinned to
needles. Eyes, strings that disintegrated.
Love, sex, death. Anecdotes of
how fast they went. And the sweet
guile of the approach, a gleaming wood
surface, razored, marked with
rings that interlocked. Bourbon, beer,
the sharp edge of a lime. I kicked
leaves in the curbs, watched backs
of strangers. My fury had been
for nothing—I saw that now. Life
was colder, blood-gleam of spilled
pennies by a door, grit trail of
cigarettes, bottle caps we made into
trees along Thompson Street Bar.
The owner and his sons would be
dead by March. It happened that way.
Out with a cold one week, in Saint
Vincent’s the next. And love the
incarnadine. A whoosh of gasoline
on asphalt streets, horse races on
the television screen above the bar,
when the black mare broke her leg,
we lost our bet and stumbled out
to a milky oblivion of stars.

 
 

Sheila Black is the author of four poetry collections, most recently “Iron, Ardent” (Educe Press, 2017). She is a co-editor of “Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability” (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Spectacle, Third Point Press, Superstition Review, The New York Times, and other places. She currently divides her time between San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, DC.