A Cherry-Red MG Roadster on Palmerston Sq, July, 2020
In the weeks after Savannah died,
I would see things
in their new, unholy
light, stripped, as you do —
here’s one, Palmerston Square
in the magic excrescence
the snow globe of glow that remains
of a sunless July evening,
I take the alley shortcut,
its mercenary efficiency
carving through the flanks of prim
brick, northwest toward Bathurst.
All the old nameless alleyways
have signposts now
like department stores.
As with affairs, being named
they end soon after.
In the weeks after someone dies,
you think about them all the time
in the act of not thinking about them:
I’m not going to think about it, I think,
sharply intaking the filigree light, a scalpel —
it isn’t true, I think, clocking the
cherry-red MG, casually resplendent, in the drive —
I’m not thinking about her —
young girl practising flute in the window —
her then-ness or or her not-ness,
jangle of hoops, tattoos and dotted cotton,
a shed snakeskin
her summer dress unmoored.
The young girl mouths her flute,
the notes wet the evening air.
Down the street, the knife-sharpener’s bell
warbles, nearing.
-Eva H.D.
AL: Note that our cherry-red MG roadster was parked in front of Friend Memorial Library, Brooklin, Maine. Photo by Henry Behrens
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