From the wayback file: “April”

Sometime between the sunset and the final word of light
A woman who smiles whenever she speaks
Hangs white clothes on a line in her yard.
This is bad luck and bad taste
But it’s convenient.
Big cars are roaring past her house
Chasing the blood scent of taillights
Dinner is writhing into the fire from out of the pan
A bird screams seven o’clock from a dark tree
She smells a chill on the secret wind
Like the kiss of a strange man.

Down in the town’s tight capillaries
A dark-skinned girl with bleach-ravaged hair
Clicks her blue steel nails like castanets
In the saturated yellow of the stay-warm light
Burning greasy over rashers in a slow carry-out —
It’s the color of a hunger she won’t talk about.
She laughs on the corner, and the sound
Is a spray of cold change from the pocket
Of a boy tossed aside by a wilding sedan
And she takes a long drag of time
And kills it on the pavement
Waiting for a bad man.

This silence! the third woman screams from her window
And a legion of doppler-warped boom boxes
Shoulders the caskets of cars.
All is awash on a dirty river of sweat-stained sound,
A funeral chain for a sun that will set unseen.
She locks all the doors and puts the kids to bed early
And climbs up the fire escape
To the sound of a neighbor’s game show applause.
The moon rises, a crisp white kneecap in muscular clouds.
She’s got her gun and her unguents,
Rosaries and mace, handbag and straight razor,
Sitting on the roof in the blue moonlight
So bright she might even get a tan
Waiting here, for as long as it takes
Waiting here for her big man.