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MORNING STROLL


Richard Fein



Each morning, except for Sunday mass
Miss O'Reilly takes tea, clam chowder, and biscuits at Nathans.
(open all year except for Yom-Kippur)

Then she goes:

to the boardwalk by the beach
and watches joggers kick sand up while avoiding
children's sand castles, and she listens to
always the sea, even at ebbtide roaring;

to the pier where men all around her pull up crab traps,
full, inside joint legged claws, faceless eyes peering
out of the wire mesh, their shells soon to be
broken, meat within plucked, eaten,
and other men reel in
fish, gills drying up, smothering in the air, so near the sea;

to the boardwalk's end
where she can say to anyone she can trap into listening,
thirty years ago her man proposed, right there by this now broken park bench
but then married an uglier girl,
didn't even tell her face to face,
did tell her mom,
and mom said that she was still a little pixy,
and as virginal as Mary.
Now in the summer, when a half-naked bikini clad girl passes her by
she snarls, “Harlot, bitch, Satan's your john, Satan's your trick”;

home
to watch daily soap operas on TV.



Scars Publications


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