I lose my job & run out of benefit I’m in
Mexico where it’s not so easy to freeze.
I’ll scavenge what I can & steal my neighbors’
water. I’ll get reckless & confuse it with
life full tilt: jump bail, sharpen shank for
associates, fall beneath their pig-sticking
luminosity, the fear of the Lord in me,
I’ll engage my last locust in a raid on the after-
life, blood threading every pore, but I won’t
come north, like Leigh, to die in the cold.
She was thin in a thin blue coat, trembling in
the vestibule, grounded in New England
winter, yet well enough to flutter up & perch
in my apartment. Her name was Leigh.
“Pronounce it lay.” She’d come home home-
less with a methadone Jones, an only child
in a city barely remembered. I made cocoa.
She said she was dying of AIDS. It was
1988; AZT hadn’t been invented. That put
an end to any notion on my part. She sobbed,
smiled, offered a half pint from a hip pocket.
I declined. Compassion faded. I said
I had to get to work. I didn’t say, “Thanks
for the story.” She thanked me instead.
–Gerald Yelle