She pedals over the trolley tracks and cobbles on Allegheny Avenue, past Szypula’s bakery, its rye line redoubled. Past Stanky’s GoGo, where yesterday her husband stumbled, booted out, said the old baba, who defends the counter at Borowski’s Cleaners. She stops at the light to let two semis chug by, and the 54 bus, and a polka dot open-hatched hatchback with speakers the size of baby coffins, salsa notes pounding them shut.
She halts at the red light, and before it changes, she sees a freighter floating between twin towers of the grain elevator and the cold storage warehouse catches her eye—the ship so endless, it seems, instead, to stand still while the whole neighborhood drifts down river, under bridges, out into the bay. (I see it all from the walkway of the Walt Whitman Bridge, the white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl....) The riptide and then back out to sea, the North, the Baltic.
The seem, though, lasting only as long as the red light, as she once again pedals, plotting, leaning into the breeze that carries the stench from Rohm and Hass, passing hoagie shop, scrap metal heap, and Lithuanian Hall—before she discovers that the red letters of the word Gdynia stenciled on the ship’s gunwale have left on her forehead a chalky residue.
Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in Missouri Review, Tupelo, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has received multiple grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council and currently teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA.
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