Sheridan Square, 1979

By Elisabeth Weiss

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Patchouli oil and Sandolino’s coffee
drift down West 4th Street 

past the sandal maker’s where 
musicians jam on weekend nights

The crackling smell of new leather
reach upper level shops

where hand embroidered peasant tops 
trade like contraband

and serve as entrance to a world 
where no one yet wastes away

from a disease for which there 
is no remedy or name. 

Diagonally from the cigar shop
iron green rails hold cement stairs

and lead underground to the southbound.
In front of the old Stonewall’s it’s quiet,

just pigeons pecking at bagel scraps.
I work the cash register and fill the racks:

fantasy in the back, music by the door,
trade paper running down the middle. 

On a plywood harvest table.
Holding my flowered skirt,

climbing ladders to reach overstock
I drink in a new sense of ownership:

Just back from Europe, no college degree. 
Once the bookstore had been a pharmacy

with a swiveling rack of paperbacks
so popular the owners had to give in

to what the neighborhood wanted.
Unnumbered streets, a crisscross of skewed geography

where nothing rests parallel 
except the edges of new type 

drawn from box cut cartons with spines yet unopened.

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Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing. She’s taught in colleges, preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She has an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She’s published poems in London Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, Birmingham Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. The Caretaker’s Lament was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.

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