Tuesday Poem: An earlier version published by Philadelphia Stories in 2007

Philadelphia Fog

It gathers in puffs outside the windows,

until even the tallest buildings,

hunched as they are near the river,

slip away like memories do

when you get older,

so you’re not sure whether

they ever really happened.

Maybe you dreamed them.

The Ben Franklin Bridge,

with its big sweeps of light

and delicate spider web curves,

erased too, like chalk on a board,

or chalk effaced by a field of chalk.

The city becomes mythology then:

a story we all agree to believe,

a creature in metamorphosis,

that old ghost, we've seen
many times, both fearsome
and genial, haunting the waterfront.

We curl inside our prisons
surrounded by nothing other than white,

worried we too might soon disappear:

like herds of tiny ancient beasts,

or schools of fish being gobbled whole

by this great white hunger

as big as a snow’s.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Fox Chase Review in 2010

                                                                    Ghost Flock by Alasdair Wallace

Heart of Washington Square 

When the birds fall

out of the trees behind you,

light as a cloud, when they lift in an arc,

wheel and bank right over the man you love,

as he stubbornly sits on a bench in the sun,

reading his book, while you hunch on another one

in the shade, preferring to take

the dimmer view, until those tiny wings

take flight, and your spirits rise up when they do,

as you will soon, conceding to a clearly cosmic

connection, the sparrows, their sheer velocity,

like Cupid’s arrows shot between you,

affirming that incongruous as the two of you

may be: red dwarf, white giant, ashiver, ablaze,

written by light, gently bathed in ink,

you’re part  of the same constellation, linked.