tWo PoEMs

tWo PoEMs

Amy Sailer

tHE usEs of city sidEWalks: coNtact

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

It’s the story you tell me over lunch. How last week, en route from your apartment to the coffee shop on Main at 8, without caffeine, having just turned from looking both ways, you stepped across the verge strip to see—

“The what?”

I hated to interrupt but had to know what you meant by verge strip, & you explained

the buffer of grass between the sidewalk & street that stretches a city’s worth away

“You mean the parkway?”

Parkway/park strip/verge strip/tree belt almost all the same, though that evening when I typed in the words, the images retrieved were not the same— The images I found agreed with me, brought up long horizontals of green, & for verge strip, a choice of designs for one’s bikini line.

“But, Amy, what I’m trying to explain is that, beyond the verge strip/parkway I crossed paths with The Grove St. Flasher”

& how it felt, watching him see your face, at him, at his belly soft & big & the shadow it made over his sex, which, yes, you did in fact see though barely,

him waiting there for someone like you or me to make, at some point in time at some point in place, the public & private conjoined

It seemed the most natural exchange you said, I can’t say I even blinked.

ProjEctioNs

I’ve a house to build things that are ours, rooms to fill thick wood— & would know living walled what’s whose

He says I’m young, unspread— my walls built to cover his his Once Was

is

I thought he could build around & house my Want We broke ground when wintered here

What is is hers this house, our walls, him Ours is built on top of theirs before it fell—

& I could if I write piece apart & unstacked keep here for myself sparser rooms