For a Neighbor It’s 8 pm and there’s that song again. Always the same one, or it sounds the same to me. I can distinguish the refrain by how the walls respond. The slapdash frame of the apartment building might collapse. You wouldn’t mind; in fact the way your bones test their own limits thrills you. And perhaps it’s philosophical – the undertones suggesting that we’re all just being taken for a ride, that life essentially consists of shaking others and being shaken harder: rhythm without melody.
Things Done and Left Undone The sun is low, the shadows tinged with flies. Someone has come unhinged; across the lawn we hear him shout profanities. Then he comes out. He’s swearing at another man who backs away towards a sedan. The first man hits the second. We are silent. From a balcony one woman yells, then disappears. Our game has stopped. The courtyard clears. “Let’s go,” a boy softly insists. We leave the man to his friend’s fists, to hot cement and creeping dark. A tiny dog begins to bark.
Hilary Biehl’s poems have appeared in various journals including Able Muse, The Orchards, and Better Than Starbucks.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 