and the nape of her neck. And a small girl with a handful of sunflowers, and a giraffe drinking rainwater from the gutter of a tanning salon. A light drizzle in the churchyard. The smell of summer on skin and a breeze that moves like alcohol in an empty stomach. What the leaves do on Labor Day. The Xmas lights sob year round and I feel like the beginning of color television in the smoking section of your father’s uncomfortable years.
The hours we knighted. As the breathing composed itself into song. A raccoon reinvented the idea behind a parade. We retraced our steps to the edge of Treme. A cry of rhythms rain in the distance. Off Dumaine a homeless man gives up, becomes a ghost in an alley. A certain trust in the comedy of drunks, in the neon overkill. The clouds rise up forever, stay far enough away. Spontaneous are the strangers who seek shadows, who become the listening part of the city.
Noah Falck is the author of Snowmen Losing Weight (BatCat Press, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Forklift Ohio, La Petite, Barn Owl Review, Fact-Simile, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He works as Education Director at Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, New York.