November 7-13, 2016: Poetry from Marie C Lecrivain and Terez Peipins

NLP: A Success Story

Birth control starts in childhood
with the admonition,

You’re going to end up
just like her…

one of the family malcontents,
who, in the old days,
would’ve marked time
by the passage of the sun
through a grimy window
while chained in the attic

Decades of this mantra
migrate through the bloodstream,
become fused to the bone,
and are scrawled across uterine walls
in bloody script. What new life
wants to spend nine moons
in an oubliette like that?

I’ve navigated my life
by this phrase. Now,
I look back on
what I’ve missed,
who I’ve dismissed,
and what I might’ve been,
and though I’m alone,
I’m strangely proud
these words will never
pass my lips to harm
the ones I could’ve loved.

Return to New York

Midnight July fifteenth
off the airport bus,
past Port Authority,
dragging luggage,
I return to a new America,
a new Times Square.
Street souls no longer
spill out of corners,
nor beggars
rattling coins
in cups,
straight out
of Damon Runyon.

TKTS recall a golden age.
Dancers in boas, kick
us back to a 50’s trance.

Past erased
in a new millennium empire.
Billboards rise over
emporiums,
product names
burnt in our brains.

Tourists in sneakers, shorts,
push past me
A sidewalk gorged
with pink fed flesh.

Consumption is bliss.
Tokyo descends
on New York,
now just as clean.

No longer the generator
of tales,
of the young stripper
at the Metropole,
of the bum prying
a shoe loose from
an art installation.

New York memories
flicker and fade
like the Nasdaq quotes.