Bag Man
The streets were quiet where the bag man walked,
Ionic columns striking white against the
brownstones dappled with starry maple shade,
a view that reeked of adjectives and
the Saturday afternoon pepper chirp
of casual parakeet jubilance from
a third story window;
slab slate sidewalks, textured like deserts
seen from thirty thousand feet, cracked
at the corners, leading to a between-brick
lacquered wooden fence, strangely Chinese;
an oleander, spindly in a pot, given furlough
in the late summer sun, evidence
of the casual unknowing insanity of city-
dwellers: he wondered if they knew
or cared that it was poisonous. And then
there—
one hand lifted up from underneath a slab,
tossed from a bankrupt bakery,
the ending of a poem
it was not, yet; it would need pounding,
lathing, contortion, pretzelization, caulking
with an oakem expensively extracted from
the base of his neck.
But he pried it from the detritus, torqued it
meditatively, stashed
it beneath one arm, a furtive look to see
who had noticed—no one; it was precious,
little poem-not-yet, salvageable, and now he
could return satisfied to his place-of-shade,
of warmth, of sustenance, well justified
of one more day of worthiness;
heaven knows,
good endings are hard to find.
Erin Hoffman is a writer and video game designer who currently calls the San Francisco bay area home. She is a columnist for Escapist Magazine and a nonfiction contributor for an assortment of magazines including Strange Horizons and Gamasutra, and recently completed editing the essay collection Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of magazines including Not One of Us, Electric Velocipede, and Antimuse, and is forthcoming in Mythic Delirium and Asimov's. She writes fantasy and science fiction, with publications in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lone Star Stories, and elsewhere. For more details and her recent publication credits, visit philomathgames.com.
