Marianne Szlyk

The First Time I Rode on Blue Hill Avenue

We were heading back to Boston. You drove.
Monday I’d give my notice to the nursing home.

I watched for streets I knew from people at work:
the residents on the floors I brought mail to,

people not quite the age I am now,
about twice the age I was then.

On long afternoons that smelled of Lysol, lotion,
and cigarettes, boiled greens and bitter, sugary coffee,

men spoke to me of smoking weed at the Hi-Hat,
dropped names and songs I didn’t know. Women spoke

of quiet mothers who wore white gloves in August to shop
for cloth they’d sew into school dresses without patterns,

their new sewing machines shaking house walls as thin as paper.
Men spoke of quarries whose ghosts you could almost glimpse.

Women spoke of elm trees that once shaded their streets. Of
lost children raised by strangers. Of lost years in Mattapan.

Note: Mattapan refers to Boston State Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill, which closed in 1987.

This poem was originally published in One Art.

 

Memories of Kew Gardens, NY 

Tinkling bells invited us in, told us
that we’d be happy here, even embraced
by this neighborhood of small shops, garden
apartments, new homes on the hill. 
Come New Years’ Day, the owner of Joy Luck
Produce gifted us a red calendar
for the kitchen we would soon be leaving.

We would abandon it for the next crew,
pilots and flight attendants jammed into
five immense rooms.  They were too big for us
flightless birds huddling beside the heater.
Soon we’d take the bus south. Even there
we’d have no joy, no luck, I told myself.

Now I tell myself any place has joy,
some luck.  I google Pam, the co-worker
who used to give me rides, who died. As if
she survived, I see her thin, with long hair,
with kids. She lives outside Kew Gardens
where too few trees grew, where you and I clung,
waiting for the heat that bound us to break.

This poem was originally published in Verse-Virtual.

 

 

In the World of Floods, In Constant Rain

I float over where I once walked beneath
gray skies with thin brown bags about to burst
with books I’d thought I should read before they
fell apart.  Somewhere below trolley tracks
stretched past a supermarket, a drug store,

a bank, a bookstore, past brownstone steps with
pots of geraniums, then fig trees and
prickly pear.  Later, as water lapped past
the harbor, banana trees guarded the steps.
These trees flourished in the simmering heat.

Evenings their owners stepped out to the Thai
place that took over what took over from
the bookstore.  Or to the Filipino
bar where they sat at the soda fountain.   
Sundays they drove to Roslindale to shop.

Sometimes fruit grew.  But there was also drought.
The river shriveled to a thin, brown thread,
mostly mud and rocks topped off with water.
No one could row there.  Now drought seems so far
away as river and ocean have merged.

Storm clouds bulk up ahead, turning bruise-black,
about to burst.  In the world of floods, much
is hidden.  Even the tracks, bony spine
that cut across the city, are obscured
by mud, by loose pages of books, by ghosts

of plants that once thrived, bore flowers and fruit,
of people, young and old, who once walked here.