A dim set—ah, obscured by billows and smoke, rivers filtered from bent slims, and mouths of the Marwan Girls. Undermined, a shade unsure—six strums into a breaking guitar, the singer gives up and runs out the front. Ah, girls—fixed glit eyes in craggy faces, cast from Long Island to the outs of the scene—mixing their own drinks, fixing and fixing their things, shag, sputter and lights—lights ghosting unguideful behind the set, nodding their heads.
Candydish in green and pink muted mints—secure five for the drive home to Merrick—it’s long at four o’clock. Expressway pounds, bridge hovers o’er water—party lights strung in the clouds—rolling the sides of a delta hill. A tunnel that keynotes some forky streams, it itself shows a vista (a squeal, a flail)—tiers of points, rows and forms, blinkers and apex and splits and draws and open, oh, oh, spark and spangle, rush and tangle, tripped headlong into structure (so it is with a Marwan Girl and a gram). Then her hands hang resting on the dark of an air.
Marwan Girls arm in arm on a smaller street. Systems changed with ups, their nails hang in each others’ backs—they bleed in the cracks of teeth, they finger silver cases and brass lighters, fumble through handbags—dump it all in the middle of the road. They hush, stumble, they fumble and stoop.
For hours it’s been clear, the birds are singing. One mutters to her pillow, “Twelves. Twelve trees on Broadway. Leave Broadway. Benches split on Wall Street. Leave Wall Street. Broad Street sleeps ‘til afternoon. Leave Broad Street. Wall Street sleeps and never wakes up. Leave Wall Street.”
-2000
