Marianne Szlyk

After Watching White Men Can’t Jump at the Capitol Theater, 1990

I remember the subway, LA’s Blue Line.
Except for the palm trees, skaters, Slurpee-colored
surf, this could be our city—with motels not
row houses, with gleaming old cars not buses.

That cold night we ate ice cream in the lobby:
mint chip and Death by Chocolate.  We wore
our new coats and joked we could visit LA,
even live there with that subway. 

You said you’d had enough of the tiny sun
that had barely melted last week’s ice and snow.
The moon and stars glinted; the sky was black ice.
You said you’d like to step outside

without your new coat, without fear of the wind,
even though we’d just come back from out west and
we were happy with our new TV and all
the old movies and Celtics games we could watch.

I don’t know if you ever made it out to
LA, rode the Blue Line, or watched men play at
the Venice courts.  I know the Capitol is
still open, serving this year’s flavors: Red Bull

and Oreo Stout.  I don’t know if you still
want to leave this city.  I know you have not.

Originally published in Verse-Virtual.

Walking The Former Orange Line in Boston, MA

Wendy walks the spine of the city
made of burnt umber brick
from tenements torn down
after fire, after renewal.

She walks beneath the canopy
of yellow-leaved trees
and sees people who look like her. 
Two shaven-headed men
play tennis.  Sweat glistens
on dark faces and white chests.
A woman, her head covered
in orange, blue, and brown cloth,
pushes her baby stroller
past a couple walking their dogs.

Wendy reminds herself that this is just a path
from one place to the next,
from café to street fair
from school to home,
for those who were not even born
when the former Orange Line
was a wall between people,
a scar running down the city’s face.

Originally published in Of/with.

At Least I Did Not Ask for Love

All of these places we’d driven past
will be gone soon, flooded over
by melted ice from Greenland
and our old age.

I thought you told me once
jazz wasn’t music.  Horns spun
out of control like fast drivers
on black ice.  Pianos pounded

at odd intervals.  Nothing developed.
Not that we listened to much music
together.  We talked as you drove.
We talked over talk radio, NPR,

then new and exciting to me,
then adult, unlike the oldies station
from Battle Ground that I listened to,
unlike the pop and punk that I did not.

I don’t think we’d have agreed on music.
Even if I tried.  Years later I listen
to your jazzy trio, the piano’s percussion,
the wallflower, awkward older sibling

to violin and flute who chase each other
across the empty green fields
that have now sprouted town homes
and upscale strip malls, everything tax free.

I’m so tired of talk radio, but
it's all we get in Rockville.  Instead
I listen to old CDs and sometimes
jazz on YouTube where horns weave in

and out like trolleys.  This time I listen
to your piano, imagine it as a cloud
welling up over distant, vacant hills,
hills with nothing but stone walls

and maple trees, hills that used to be
someplace, farmland where cows
or sheep grazed, horses tilled
rocky fields, ponies jogged, places

we were too young to see.