Poetry of Issue #6                        Page 63
Previous Next Table of Contents	The lady in 4C Now you see, they said I saw a cat leap off the top of things piled to the ceiling I saw another pile she had to climb to reach her bed each night, saw the dirt layered sink and loose wall sockets faucets she forgot to shut off leaking complaints sent back up from the tenant below, and when a box propped against the fridge to keep it closed, didn’t and workmen wouldn’t go in there to fix anything, she turned down the landlord’s offer to pay a cleaning crew to come in, and later his ten-grand to move out… now you see, they said I saw their fear that went beyond being trapped in a fire or asphyxiated by gas because of one woman whose eyes spoke conversations I could see in eyes that didn’t always see me, a woman like I am who lives in the 9—5 margins and isn’t me who gets by singing in Village cafes reading to a blind woman, wears what can be found on the street, sometimes I’d see her carrying out a small garbage bag, I’m doing what I can, she said we all are, I answered this woman who’d become the sheltering wall from what those who’d lived in the same building for over thirty years felt helpless against: fear of ever being homeless of losing it not being able to get out of bed one day and make a cup of coffee when even breathing might become too much: fear that their world the only world they know could abruptly end Now you see, they chanted   Linda Lerner __	To a Poet Who Sentences Herself unable to break free of the period rush out of breath down the page into whatever crazy weather happens as when a child she ran through Whitman’s grass before her mother stopped her and stopped her again and she learned to stop herself…a woman who’s flown across two continents, spent a year abroad can’t move out of the sentence she paces back & forth in every day trying to shut out free spirit jazzy sounds coming through but habit and the man playing them lead her to briefly venture past the period, toward him for whom getting the sound is everything his habit, beside the point, hers the point itself   Linda Lerner__	©CTvM: Big Yellow Flight, angel object 1988