Sunday, June 8, 2025

Suffolk Street, December 1989 by Nancy Bevilaqua

 

Image | Jana Al Mubaslat

Suffolk Street, December 1989

 

Toward the old barely 

furnished room: I’d rather hide my horses there

beside the radiator frozen in the window glass

inside uncertain prospect of that Christmas.

How I held you. What awakened me. You

as catalyst, incipient.

Your death

no different from the other deaths that year.

I was young then, knew the streets,

each one a strand of river in me and direction.

Manhattan folded over as a wave inside my skins.

Now my knees are giving out: not kneeling

but receiving.

My insolence in knowing what’s not known,

what’s music sense: the words

are unimportant.

The skin itself will not remember anything.


© Nancy Bevilaqua



Nancy Bevilaqua

Nancy Bevilaqua is a poet who has also worked as a caseworker for people with AIDS and as a travel writer. Her poems have been published in West Branch, Whiskey Island, Juked, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, and other publications. She now lives in Hoboken, NJ, where she is finally realizing her 50-year-old dream of learning to play drums.

 

 

 

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