Busy Night Poem by Chris Ritter
The car alarm jabs the neighbors awake every fifteen minutes when its bark sets off the strays in their chorus of call and response and the supermarket down the block has an alarm, too; it throbs like a synthesizer overlay on an old disco track, but the neighbors don’t dance except for the young couple across the street who hustle out on the stoop to the rhythm of their raised voices, the angry tempo of go ahead and do it, of big man, of bitch, while sometime traffic on Broad Street whispers its wheels on asphalt to hush its roll through streetlights’ amber cone before the siren song of the EMT’s carting someone in the truck to the ER on the other side of town while neighbors wish, maybe, that they were in one of the planes overhead, the belly-lights sly wink like saying, You know this is all bullshit, right? before it screams down onto the runway at the airport across the river - or perhaps it’s the ringing they hear borne in the brief quiet of their own bedrooms, the brazen scurry of blood through their ears’ capillaries, the rattle of breath only they can hear like a dream they can’t quite rise from, a song almost recalled, its ancient refrain on a loop they can’t shake, in the mystery of sleep, awake, a puzzle, impossible, like how, after all, day breaks without a sound.
Chris Ritter is a Philadelphia native living and working in a South Jersey suburb.
PS SUMMER 2021
22
