All in by Elisabeth Weiss
by Elisabeth Weiss
Patchouli oil and Sandolino’s coffee
drift down West 4th Street
past the sandal maker’s where
musicians jam on weekend nights
The crackling smell of new leather
reach upper level shops
where hand embroidered peasant tops
trade like contraband
and serve as entrance to a world
where no one yet wastes away
from a disease for which there
is no remedy or name.
Diagonally from the cigar shop
iron green rails hold cement stairs
and lead underground to the southbound.
In front of the old Stonewall’s it’s quiet,
just pigeons pecking at bagel scraps.
I work the cash register and fill the racks:
fantasy in the back, music by the door,
trade paper running down the middle.
On a plywood harvest table.
Holding my flowered skirt,
climbing ladders to reach overstock
I drink in a new sense of ownership:
Just back from Europe, no college degree.
Once the bookstore had been a pharmacy
with a swiveling rack of paperbacks
so popular the owners had to give in
to what the neighborhood wanted.
Unnumbered streets, a crisscross of skewed geography
where nothing rests parallel
except the edges of new type
drawn from box cut cartons with spines yet unopened.
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Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing. She’s taught in colleges, preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She has an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She’s published poems in London Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, Birmingham Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. The Caretaker’s Lament was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.