The Eighth Avenue Boarding House Incident

A brief story - based poem

 

The cobblestone street lined

with overfilled trash cans in

front of boarded-up shops.

 

A smell of mildewing lox and

stale bagel overpowers you

as you cross the rotting wood

Benedict Arnold Bridge. There

on that archaic boulevard

Is Birnbaum’s Grill and Boarding

House Laundry. A stone structure

with its chipping gray paint and

broken windows.

 

 Inside, on

a third-floor aisle room, an old

man sleeps and dreams, an old man's

dreams, his entertainment--

as real as death, and social

security checks.

 

The things

that allowed him his bent cans

of dog food and second-hand

can opener.

 

This man

.(who remains nameless,

except to the government

and Mrs. Cohen, who died two

years ago), now turns on

the stove in which the pilot light

has not been Iit for years, and

throws the matches away.

 

That spring

sticking up through the

mattress jabbed him for the

last time,

 he thought.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

There is a great deal to like about this piece: it's highly visual and creates the appropriate atmosphere, and the central conceit is strong and well laid out (it puts me in a bit of the old Simon and Garfunkel tune "A Most Peculiar Man") and it's done in a manner that doesn't employ a lot of shouting or weeping. There are some items I found a bit off-putting. I think the second and fourth stanzas are somewhat too prose-y and straight ahead. I might also move the first two lines of the second stanza into the third stanza; I think its a better fit there. I have mixed emotions about the final stanza: part of me thinks it's too abrupt, an attempt to tie it up too cleanly, but part of me thinks that suicide is a pretty damn abrupt way to end one's days, and the citing of one very minor irritation is a clever juxtaposition with all the big things that have gone wrong in the subject's life, so I'm torn on that. There is a lot here to chew on, and there so many ways a piece like this could and have been done badly, so you can't deny this is solid stuff.