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Here in the Afterlife, CLP/Integral

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featured poet – Valerie Bridge


Valerie Bridge

in search of time before

let’s go hear voices down dusty alleyways
where ‘have you the time’ is asked by girls in red skirts
and replies echo long in cracked pavings
                                                                 come let footsteps clang on outside stairways
                                                                 before sunset from across town districts
                                                                 to outdo onion sellers on bicycles
come see the tired lame at ease with themselves
as they raise pastis and double espressos and
the Marseillaise trickles over windowsills
                                                                 some recall promises made under gunfire
                                                                 another hides Mona under his unmade bed
                                                                 smiles at an old lame dog down by the Seine
in dusk stilled to be reborn in empty streets
three in doorways offer Gauloises and talk
of fresh young men washed in Eau de Cologne
                                                                 so they will walk pitted cobblestones
                                                                 to reclaim what maybe time was in stairwells
                                                                 so might have been is left to silhouette
them enter the wayward other streets
into inner rooms as if they still matter
as their lips resist the taste of other
                                                                 ‘oh my god what was the point tell me that’
                                                                 yet their soft hands maybe reach out to brush
                                                                 against inner elbow skin, exclaim ‘yes’
as in a basement window a mannequin
abandoned lolls against a cold pane
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 78, August 2023