TWIN PYRES
Smoke slithered straight
down the avenue,
its ghastly tentacles
Reaching from beyond
the suddenly sprung graveyard
created by the burning rubble,
Touching us even ten miles away,
and reminding us that life is as fragile as
towers of glass shattered by rogue planes.
OVERNIGHT IN THE CITY
The hollow thump-thump-thump
of rubber trash bins bumping
in their off-kilter way as wind
blows them against outer walls
of houses only a driveway’s distance apart
The rude two a.m. thud and hum
of a car stereo’s bass turned up so high
that words can’t be distinguished despite
an entire backseat likely fashionably filled with speakers
so listeners will know, from blocks distant, that this car comes
A random yell
followed by silence—
whether a good sign
or a bad one,
impossible to tell
In the gray before dawn, the scraping chains
of a repo truck—an unmistakable sound
once you’re previously heard
another take away a neighbor’s
payment-overdue ride
Stay in bed for now, if you wish, but
say your morning prayers
and be thankful if your own
drama is quieter
than this and limits itself to daylight hours
AUSTIN STREET FAIR
Ascending from the sub-
way two—may-
be three—stories beneath street-
level, we arrive:
it’s 71st and Continental, and the intersection
with Austin Street in Forest Hills is filled from east to west
with booths on both sides between NYPD barricades.
We walk behind the booths,
watch vendors give bags of
kettle corn to couples,
watch parents purchase snap-bottom romper suits with
clever screen printed words for babies in jogging strollers,
watch children bounce down
blow-up slides leading to pools of squishy foam balls.
Elderly ladies sporting purple-red pin curls,
big sunglasses, and designer sweat suits with sneakers,
study all of us passersby surreptitiously from behind dark lenses;
sometimes it looks like a sidewalk contest: Who’ll win
the largest real estate—the babushka grasping the cane,
or the also-sunglasses-wearing tot being pushed in a Peg Perego? We with older
kids slip through the crowds—enjoying the ebb and flow around us.
Summer is street-fair season in NYC,
the urban equivalent of the volunteer firehouse carnival
in small suburbs and still-smaller towns around
the U.S.—the street fair’s the place
you can feel as if you belong
to a culture (Polish, Korean, Italian, Puerto Rican—almost any –ish or –an)
or a community (try, say, Tribeca—or, hey, I know!—Forest Hills).
CONGRATULATIONS—YOU’RE FULLY VACCINATED!
Written in spring 2021, in the New York City borough of Queens
The remnants of an early spring snow
still mark the sidewalks, iced-over piles
of gray and white crystals lining the concrete
with the random logic of a hopscotch game;
we have to step over one mound here, another there,
to keep ourselves from taking a skate.
At last, we make it to the bus stop.
If the pandemic weren’t forcing so many
to continue working from home, this crowd would
probably resemble the posters that line
the walls above the windows: There’s always space
at the back of the bus; a cartoon picture shows
a bus packed fore and aft with overflow hanging out the rear door.
It’s actually not that funny—I’ve seen it happen before.
Amazingly, we find a seat to share, where
we can hold hands while the route snakes around,
drawing us ever closer to Jamaica. Several rows
ahead, in the front seats that are supposed to be saved
for riders with mobility issues, a twenty- or thirty-
something man splays his legs, pulls down his mask,
and starts to cough. We’re well distant, but
can see his glassy eyes, a flushed sheen on his skin.
Could he have COVID? “Ay, Dios mio,”
shrieks one lady as she lifts her purse before her like
a shield. “No me dé la enfermedad!”
Another woman, maternal looking
with a head of gray curls, polyester pants, and
sensible shoes, hisses, “Pull up your mask!”
She demonstrates with latex-gloved hands as she
glares over her own mask, through a clear plastic face-visor.
We glance at each other, squeeze our clasped hands
in mutual reassurance. More coughing ensues;
it sounds like the dry, desperate, air-seeking cough
we’ve learned that comes with COVID;
but when he can catch a breath, beyond a glare
in return at the nervous women, he snarls, “Shut up, bitches!
I ain’t sick! …’Sides, who can cough through a mask?”
We glance at each other again, eyebrows raised.
The irony isn’t lost on us that we’re in transit
for our second COVID vaccine shots. “Let’s exit
at the back,” we quietly agree. And so we do.
No more than an hour later, we’re waiting in recovery chairs,
National Guardsmen and women monitoring our post-shot health,
and, in front of us, we read brightly colored whiteboard words:
“Congratulations—you’re fully vaccinated!”
BOX TURTLE
I stopped sweeping when I heard a scritching, scratching
sound in the summer-green leaves of weeds
grown up in the square of earth the city requires
us to keep around our roadside sycamore tree.
I stopped sweeping and peered at the
ground, half expecting to see nothing but more
sheets of peeling bark falling down, because this is the
season when sycamores shed their old skin.
I stopped sweeping man-made trash—soda cans
flattened by passing vehicles, a torn-up math test
sporting a glaring red “F” on one scrap—so I wouldn’t make too much
noise and scare away whatever natural thing it was.
Cat? Rat? Mouse? Raccoon? Bird or large bug?
In the city, I’d seen them all,
often where I felt they didn’t belong
(i.e., not in what I thought of
as my private, human space—the basement of my house,
or on my porch blocking my front door).
The urban setting was not where I expected to see
a box turtle, goldenrod-colored open-quadrilateral markings
on a dark shell, camouflaged by sun and shade
as it carefully picked its squat, chubby legs
through the maze of plants at the base of “my” tree.
This populated area, dominated by concrete
and close to a busy street, would not be a safe place
for this turtle, my husband and I decided.
So he picked it up by its shell, and moved it to our backyard.
Later that same day, having read how
rare box turtles are in our state,
we both searched our garden out back,
but it had gone—somewhere—into hiding again.
Margaret Adams Birth is the author of Borderlands (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in more than 50 journals including Plainsongs, Lunch Ticket, Third Wednesday, The Pointed Circle, Highland Park Poetry, and DarkWinter Literary Magazine (Canada). Four of her poems were previously published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal on 9 April 2023. She has also published short stories and novellas (some of them written under the pen names Maggie Adams and Rhett Shepard), short nonfiction, and even a few comic books. She is a native North Carolinian who has also lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, upstate New York, southern California, a rain forest on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, and now New York City. You can find her online at https://www.facebook.com/MaggieAdamsRhettShepard.
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