“Freestyle” © Kelly Sauvage Moyer

 

Holding Both

A weight-acquiring, human-made, and inevitable thing like
the numbered streets that grade down to Lower Manhattan.
I answered to each grand passion, the memorial chapel,
where Ginsberg, O’Hara, and others once did. A brick spire,
sweeping streets sweeping me off to Brooklyn, where for a
moment I’ll remain. Island-hopping over, under a gray and
frayed sky, concrete and glass city building edges curled
and smeared like burnt paper, and then away. That’s the
way things have been for a while. Not impossible to
understand seeds and fruits of anguish in the hand, never to
eat them, never even to throw them off the bridge into
running streams. To have both. Grip them.

 

David M. Alper’s work appears in The McNeese Review, The Bookends Review, The Argyle Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.

Kelly Sauvage Moyer is an award-winning poet, photographer and fiber artist, who pursues her muse through New Orleans’s French Quarter. She is the author of four books, including Hushpuppy and Mother Pomegranate and Other Fairytales for Grown-Ups, both released by Nun Prophet Press. She is the editor of Failed Haiku.