Poetry – Issue 10 | September 2010
Macy’s, 2007
by Adam Falkner
after Ross Gay
Because rent is two weeks late for the third straight month
since May, because she is 43 and the bar down the block
he promised to return from last spring has been shut down
for months, because she looks like my mother
and all she wants is for someone to say her name
in that certain way, because new heels are not a luxury
when the manager’s attention needs keeping
(and the refrigerator needs filling), because I know
the kind of sludge that this wet city air can make
of a person’s brain in the summer – how heat
can be a convenient enough excuse for anything
and everything – I don’t even glance in her direction
when she swings a round of sharp bullet backhands
into the ear of her youngest son in the shoe aisle.
He falls to the rough carpet in tears, bangs his head
like a racket ball against the metal shoe-sizer on the floor,
whimpers in a heap like a kicked dog. I don’t even glance
in their direction. I need some new shoes, too.
About the author
Adam Falkner is a poet, musician, high school English/Creative Writing teacher and former Michael Jackson dance-off champion – although he will probably deny the latter of those if asked. Published in anthologies and journals including decomP Magazine, The Esu Review, The Other Journal, Adam’s poems have been featured on HBO, BET, Michigan and New York Public Radio and in Time Out New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Read our current issue, Issue 10 | September 2010:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
