On Westminster Street. On a day with a cold, cruel sun.
When you left Providence, the river & I with our lithium blue
cries howled for you across I-95. At White Electric, batch
after batch of coffee burned behind the counter; each pitcher
of milk scalded in its glass. All of the oversized armchairs lost
their cushion—they couldn’t comfort anyone with you gone.
Riffraff boarded up with no more books to show you, no
more late night love poems, written in the haze of headlights
aimed north towards Boston. This town & I are the same:
we both want to be more than a place people pass through.
So I take our pocket sized city to the post office, sure
I could ship all of Providence to you for 68 cents. Please,
I tell the postman. We’ve got a problem that can’t be folded
down. Without you, red bricks are crumbling inside the center
of the city’s ventricles. Rhode Island’s lockbox lungs are full
of Atlantic seawater, & we’re wrecked across the wooden
railing of our boxed up house. That day, when you challenged
the sun to a bar fight & lost, when you swallowed the darts
of your own despair, when I found you, on Westminster,
welded to your life like the stainless steel joint of a railcar
I knew; nothing could keep you here any longer. & so
I understand, beloved, that you have to leave the Ocean
State & all its anchors. Just know that around the corner
from the Kwikie Mart lives a collection of glowing red letter
signs, promising that somewhere, in some forgotten alley,
there’s a door that’s still open, asking for you to come in.