[114 words]
Streetlight purrs against the glass,
a cold current threading through
cracked sidewalks and bus stop benches.
Here—
everything is waiting:
the man with the paper sack of scotch,
a woman clutching her phone like a loaded gun,
pigeons claiming a cornice of a brownstone.
Billboards buzzing with neon songs,
while sirens punctuate
across the night’s half-finished sentence.
We walk in fragments,
names erased by traffic,
faces carried like backpacks
through a grid of forgetting.
Yet in a sudden pause—
a boy laughing at the echo of his mother’s stilettos
a mural flaking like gold leaf—
the city inhales,
and we remember
it is alive,
exhaling us back
into the rhythm of its zealous heart.
Thomas Deane Tucker is a native Floridian who, for the past 26 years, has taught Philosophy and Humanities at a college on the High Plains of Nebraska. He is widely published in various poetry journals, as well as having written three academic books. He loves the Great Plains, but will always yearn for the sea
Image Credithttps://www.pexels.com/photo/building-at-night-14046048/
