Stopped At A Light,
I see a man tight roping
a broken line. Cars
gore the air around him.
He totters in their wake.
He’s in his late forties,
dirty blond, blood shot
through his eyes, a piece of
cardboard cradled loose
as a rifle under his arm,
one scrawled word: “hungry.”
I close my eyes—see him
wadding through a rice paddy
now, tracers sparking
the blue, a ghost platoon
fanning out around, a brother
to my hands, my tongue,
my eyes—see him and for
a flash imagine I can save
him, pull him out of the dark
water, give him another life,
but then the light changes,
and I realize I can’t, I can’t,
I‘m late, and the light is
green, and there are so many
streets like this, and so little
I can change by going back.
r. g. cantalupo’s work has been published in over a hundred literary journals throughout the United States, Canada, and England. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Studio Theater West in Santa Monica, CA and a Dual-Genre MFA graduate in Poetry and Creative Non-fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
I see a man tight roping
a broken line. Cars
gore the air around him.
He totters in their wake.
He’s in his late forties,
dirty blond, blood shot
through his eyes, a piece of
cardboard cradled loose
as a rifle under his arm,
one scrawled word: “hungry.”
I close my eyes—see him
wadding through a rice paddy
now, tracers sparking
the blue, a ghost platoon
fanning out around, a brother
to my hands, my tongue,
my eyes—see him and for
a flash imagine I can save
him, pull him out of the dark
water, give him another life,
but then the light changes,
and I realize I can’t, I can’t,
I‘m late, and the light is
green, and there are so many
streets like this, and so little
I can change by going back.
r. g. cantalupo’s work has been published in over a hundred literary journals throughout the United States, Canada, and England. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Studio Theater West in Santa Monica, CA and a Dual-Genre MFA graduate in Poetry and Creative Non-fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts.