the shelter in

by Rebecca Siegel

Lithe limbed and Street smarted, She climbed through the concrete trees. Hanging from iron bar to iron bar, her eyes adrift the scene of a yellow city vacated. A city untouched but Empty, Soulless. The Bronx no longer Boogey down but shut up. Shut up! One can almost hear screamed across the empty living room at a face once there now no longer breathing. Life exists in hordes against the background of a Friday night. Now it does not in unshared moments, in bodies clanging against each other in mention only, in imagined, feverish scenarios of which one can only dream as they cross eyes with that other solitary runner on the river at night in the dark it is cold, so cold from the wind and no one or nothing left to share it with. I used to spend nights like these walking, Lithe-limbed Through the streets, My body used to belong to the absence of pavement on thirty-third street -- one with life, now everything in vacancy.