Morningside Heights July
Haze.
Three student violists boarding a bus.
A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light.
A film of sweat for primer and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench: she tells him he must be psychic, for how else could he sense, even before she knew, that she’d need to call it off?
A bicyclist fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle on the boil.
I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies.
Two cabs almost collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says.
The comforts of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming up or down.
A lank cat slinks liquidly around a corner.
How familiar it feels to feel strange, hollower than a bassoon.
A rill of chill air in the leaves.
A car alarm.
Hail.
William Matthews
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