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Written by S. Donovan Mullaney
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Alleyways [by S. Donovan Mullaney]
The city has replaced the gunshots
and caged walkways of Cabrini Green
with a Home Design store, condominiums,
and a convention center.
In the shuttered gray-brown valleys that remain
behind the stone and glass
storefronts and housing blocks,
the old New World loiters dreamless
twenty feet from light.
Dumpster echoes creep like thieves
up fire escapes
to rap on rear windows.
Castoffs fight over rubber bands
and needles: bloodshot currency.
Words spill from mouths with no teeth
to hold them back. Arms flail
and crack
like angry windmills.
Weeds and moss grow quietly
in the alley corners, raising generations
in silent, green witness
of unfolding Passion Play.
Another cotton-jacketed mannequin,
I file past, holding my face carefully
earthward—eyes forward, fixed.
The alley mouths close behind me.
Indigo Lovesong
My pen holds three night-skies of blue
midnight, enough for acres of corn-row marks.
Marks that make words that make light of the legal rule
to which they seem to conform. A jacket catches my eye,
backdrop for a woman's black braids, absence of color
or all colors at once. The pen hurries to follow
a man in tight coif & sport coat who follows
the woman to the counter, his jeans and eyes denim blue.
I smile at him vaguely. He loses color,
scans the coffeehouse menu. The marks
on the board offer no relief for his appetite or eye.
He exits quickly. I've broken some rule.
Like paper cuts on cuticles!—the need for rules
to govern interaction between men; loneliness often follows.
My book recaptures my eye,
dares me disturb a universe with my own displays of blue.
Eliot's “Complete Poems” shows the hard marks
of repeat re-read in its binding's faded color.
Unlike Prufrock, buoys keep me from dark colors
of deep water pressure—those locker-room rules—
buoys that float above smirks, stares, remarks,
above indecision & self-derision to follow
a vision of gray shot with navy blue:
the color and the mood of those eyes. Eyes
I'd search & write in sunlight, eyes
above cheeks creased with pillow-blush color,
mirrors of my own indigo, blue on blue.
I leave quickly the morning after, as a rule.
Rare that breakfast (or another night) follows:
a moving target gathers no marks.
At the counter, the barrista adds a sixth mark
to my card. She's read my order in my eyes,
an order she efficiently follows;
six black coffees—I hate that wish-wash tan color—
and the next cup is free! That's the rule
here. She'd better draw my victory 'X' in blue.
Eye wanders; pen follows, scribbling diligent marks.
Like a backed-up sink, blue submerges white before my eyes:
indigo color-spills on rule after rule.
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