The Numbers Are Going Up Again

We thought it would be gone by now.
Not so.  November 
the skyline has begun its ice grey 
emptiness. We are still
protectors in masks.
The scaffolds, city, cold gunmetal blur.
I pull my scarf closer & coil 
my arms around my wire & glass body.
You stand at a distance. 
           I don’t say anything real
about us because it’s too windy & raw
to sit outdoors on the bench with the view
of the Brooklyn Bridge glooming.
The noon sun too buries under a cloud cover.
You remember how much 
rain fell the first time we walked across.
I squint to search the small worried brown wells
that are your eyes. Your brow 
a single horizontal line 
sure & straight as a tree fallen across a forest bed.
I wish you would come closer.
I used to be able 
to see the long creek winding in your smile.

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Bonnie Jill Emanuel is a recent graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at The City College of New York, where she received the 2020 Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Stark Poetry Prize in memory of Raymond Patterson. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Midwest Review, Love's Executive Order (poems on the Trump presidency), Chiron Review, and other fine journals. Born in Detroit, she now lives and writes in New York.