Horizon Walkers - Gregg Mosson
On the horizon, two lovers hold hands, as the sun
from its lap spills orange and brass, and slathers
lush yellows and purples over the fat. porous earth.
So ripe and rotund, the sun crashes and crashes. . . .
I squeeze your hand—those horizon walkers might be us—
as two women, holding hands, walk toward us and pass.
They glance back through the snowfall, and smile to themselves.
We seem sunset ghosts from their incipient days.
That night we assumed we awoke to some personal
twilight dawn, but it was just the last attenuated light
lingering and dancing on two autumn leaves,
exhumed from snow and spiraling through dusk.
Free for Students - Ryan Donnelly
$2 for a movie
is well worth the $1 for bus ride to the theaterand another for the return trip.
Even if you go alone,
$4 gets you out of the apartment
on a freezing Saturday—
a woman tells me as we share
a muddy tract by the curb.
The bus should come soon.
Her coat is too snug against her
generous figure, cheap
and cut for a man,
like her hair was.
She rocks back and forth
against the wind that I
pretend carries away all the smells
that define her:
cigarettes, mold, maybe child support.
I leave her standing
by the sign waiting for the $1 bus,
since the university shuttle
won't take her where she needs to go.
Settling warm into one of the vinyl bucket seats,
I think of the accommodations $1 buys
you in Rochester. I think of taking my
keys between my fingers and stabbing
them into the upholstery,
ripping it from head to seat
to uncover the hard plastic benches
blackened chewing gum and graffiti
that must be here somewhere,
wishing I could do the same
to that woman at the bus stop—
cast her into the mud,
split her open
and look around inside her
for the things I've misplaced.
The Boxers - Sid Gold
I
Evenings I walk to the corner deli
& down two bottles of beer
while trading shadow jabs with Tuffy Lee,
a bantamweight out of Newport News
who last stepped through the ropes
in ’66, laying bricks ever since.
Tuffy’s pomaded hair is waved into low ridges
that sit like knuckles on his skull
& every gesture springs from his elfin frame
like a fighter’s bob or weave.
In a hoarse whisper straining for breath,
he spits out his life like a mouthpiece:
the five children he raised,
the 8 counts he took, the number of times
he was dropped to one knee, his head
filled with fog, yet somehow managed to rise.
II
On my bedroom wall I’ve tacked
an old fight poster left by a friend.
The boxers’ torsos are gloveleather smooth,
their mugs sullen, underfed.
They glare from the wall in tight-lipped fury:
men intent on bloodying another if need be.
Yet they are all unknowns, tomato cans,
opponents tapped to fill out a night’s card,
their eyes vulnerable beneath the posing,
& hoping, each one of them, they still have
what it takes to dance, jab, clinch or slug
their way through four or six rounds.