Nothing to explain in Crescent City

posted Apr 12, 2011

A silver man in a box off Bourbon looked like sculpture and asleep. I wanted to touch his gleaming face and I am a cool customer. His body was language, public and private at the same time. A small dog lay near the silver man in the box. From different angles they looked together, then apart, then together. I started to see pregnancy everywhere. I felt the eyes of anyone I had ever known staring down on me. Their expression was the usual pleasant but also firm. They asked, What secrets are stored in the roots of things? In the sky there was no night, only the screaming of hundreds of starlings that made it feel like night.

Leslie Seldin's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Bateau Press and Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics. She lives in New York City.

We’ve published two more poems by Seldin: “Don't go away right away” and “What is it the others hear?.”