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Indigo Joanne Hotchkiss is a long-time SF resident, poet, and former editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Review.
This Morning
by Indigo Joanne Hotchkiss
In the Panhandle park
a homeless man quietly sews
while mowing machines
run fast circles all around him
and a bench-full of tenants
from the half-way house smoke,
all eyes on the ground.
Street people on Haight
form a grinning
Greek chorus
whenever vulnerability is present.
I'm confused,
forget to eat,
sit down with friends pulling
prices from the shoes
they are selling to the Wasteland
and talk of the difficulty
of staying in their bodies.
At the comer of Cole,
a painter throws a live bird at me,
raises his hand like a magician
and a small, black bird is flung, flying up
and across the street landing safely where I stand
by the Rock Medical clinic.
And I think of the heron I watched
fly toward the park
this morning
and know I was meant to follow
so I do and a strange man
blesses me.
Now, with the sun on my back,
traffic moves beneath
a green curtain of trees
as I write on a concrete table
and a woman
dancing with a sword
does a back-flip, I swear,
while the unlikely boom-box of a passing
Rastifarian plays Rachmaninoff.
View From City Lights Poetry Room
by Peter McLaughlin
bricks faded red bricks
a Chinatown tenement
a hidden side street
dead end
from a rusty wire hanger
dangles inexplicable meat
unidentifiable
pink and shiny and resolute
just outside the cracked window
above an aged fire escape
littered with soggy refuse
papers and plastic bags
diapers and other relics
unfit even for pigeons
jockey shorts linen a lone kerchief
stretched tight on a makeshift line
flanking inexplicable meat
fish or fowl or game
mysterious carcasses over the alley
clunking into one another
absurd silent chimes
seasoned by inner city stench
urine and diesel and decay
and sewer grate steam
awaiting a perfect moment
atop a warm bed of rice
or noodles
perhaps floating in broth
inexplicable meat
across the way two stories up
in the chill winter air
sustaining some immigrant family
through sickness and homework
and driving school
and indecipherable government forms
and muted orgasms
as the children dream
and a passing patriarch
sharing a room
with two kids and a parakeet
spent and frail
watching a favorite program
prostrate on the sagging couch
laughing along with the Mandarin studio audience
coughing a bit
the pain in his ribs
reminding of his imminent coda
familiar aromas
drift in from the kitchen
inexplicable meat
comforting a weary husk
of a man
dying amidst his progeny
having washed dishes mopped floors
late into the night
saying goodbye in December
as his middle aged daughter
scolds his teen aged grandson
reaches a sure hand
through tattered curtains
out into the greasy air
plucks another meal
from the patient line
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