Charity

Poetry by Katya Schwenk

The cottonwoods were flooding the parking lot with whitewater,
if you remember, and the apple trees rotting in their abundance. 
In those days we said we’d buy an attic all our own in a highrise over the salted lake 
to write poetry about sunburns. In those days Zuccotti Park was occupied,
but not Church Street, and not our minds. We read sherbet-colored comics
and we watched the factory workers pour boiling chocolate into bathtubs
while the motion pictures were thawing off the screens. 
I hear Manhattan is empty now, and the East River is still as terracotta. 
I hear only the pigeons are left, orating on their bowed, gnarled podiums
to the brokers and plunderers. Your mother is seeing her patients through her car window, 
where they show her cysts and strange swellings like it’s a drive-in.
There is a girl busking by the Baptist church, in the quiet, where we once fiddled
jigs and reels for the opulent diners. They skipped pennies into our sunhats
and, later, we bought butterscotch candies that melted all over our fingers.

Katya Schwenk is a writer and journalist based in Burlington, Vermont. Her work has appeared in Popula, The Intercept, and The American Prospect, among other places. You can find her at www.katyaschwenk.com or on Twitter: @ktyschwnk.