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Poet and teacher Alison Seevak's work has appeared in journals and anthologies,
including The Sun, Many Mountains Moving and Lilith. She has taught creative writing
through California Poets in the Schools and San Francisco WritersCorps.
Sometimes, in Unfamiliar Neighborhoods
by Alison Seevak
You pull up to a red light
and a young Black man
walks toward the corner
where you've stopped,
hands in his pockets
baggy jeans, sweatshirt,
blue knit cap pulled down
over his ears and you hate
the nervous, blonde woman
you see in the rearview mirror,
the one who wishes
the light would change,
the one who forgets
how anxious she was
just a few minutes ago
to get to therapy, or to the market
before it closes.
Get a hold of yourself, you say.
He's walking to the bus.
He's on his way to see his daughter.
He's going to take his grandmother
to the doctor, for God's sake.
Turn green, turn green, your heart beats.
And when it doesn't
and he's gotten closer
you're thankful that your car
has automatic everything.
He didn't have to see you
lift your hand from the steering wheel
to lock the doors.
But, really, you know, it doesn't matter.
He saw your scared, pale face
and no matter what you did
or how you did it,
he heard that loud, hard click
a long time ago.
Poet and teacher Alison Seevak's work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including The Sun, Many Mountains Moving and Lilith. She has taught creative writing
through California Poets in the Schools and San Francisco WritersCorps.
Tenderloin Poem
by Leonard Irving
Here on Eddy Street
fog filled
and flayed by wind.
Drain clogged,
down-at-heel way station
for the lost and found.
Destitute gamblers.
Drunk cripples.
Blanketed figures
asleep in pawnshop doorways.
Con artists and
dispirited addicts.
Filthy. Stealthy.
Racism and rape
around dark corners.
The straightlaced.
The disgraced.
Red-eyed women seeking trade.
Wasters dethroned of self respect
Lush wine beggars,
Wanderers wandering
forever deeper into exile.
Ragged vagrants of men.
The torn, forlorn,
wild and defiled.
Yet still you hear
cries of children
floating under balloons,
and lovers. Lovers too
dwell on Eddy.
Here as everywhere
else in life.
Unsteady. Unready.
Breadless on Eddy.
Resident at 670.
Haunted. At times undaunted.
Inside this wild street
intensely surrounded
with all I ever wanted.
San Francisco Goes to Pray
by Julia Vinograd
When her shopping cart people
with coins on their eyes
steal names of dead poets off her street signs
and dance with them all night
cause you've got to dance with something,
City, she wakes next morning
her slim ankles aching and her hair all a-tangle.
When her briefcase people read contracts
instead of graffiti! on the company bathroom walls
on the other side of town they dress a slum baby girl
only in Daddy's pink slips from all Daddy's lost jobs,
and City, she wears bright colors and slinky black
to her nightclubs but she never wears pink.
When her cabbies yell at her traffic.
When her clouds yell at her traffic.
When her best dress made of steam coming from a manhole grating
in the street and Playboy centerfolds sewn over her breasts
tears like paper, crumbling in her hands.
When it's too much. City, she goes to pray.
There's this place. Not on a map.
The stained glass windows of a green and joyful land
are made of broken beer bottles
and red from a wine bottle for the apple.
Junky needles outline the star.
Biker angels play with the child,
grinning snaggle-toothed with shiny chains and leather wings,
but the 5 kings were mugged, crowns and gifts stolen,
left to climb out of a ditch.
They look so silly. City, she-always smiles
At the pulpit a speed freak waves his arms.
He's lost his voice but he can't stop,
words blow out of his mouth like dead newspapers.
City, she kneels and cradles her restless face in her long fingers
but she don't listen. Nobody does.
City, she wears bright lipstick kisses on her fingers like rings,
she always leaves a kiss wriggling in the poor box.
There's a naked choir dressed in slaps and bruises
moaning “no, no, please stop”.
Funeral lilies grow between their thighs.
A gargoyle organist who's almost human except he needs dusting
leads the choir. City, she bows her head. Such beautiful music.
Just before leaving City, she dips her fingers
in the mirror on the alter and puts a shine back in her eyes.
City, she breathes in the Blues like incense,
curses a candle and lights the darkness
like every lover.
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