Rachel Ida Buff
Pandemic Winter

The unhoused man who comes to our door,
Asking for money for food, for bus fare, or rent, when he has a place
Annoys my husband. “If you give him things,
He’ll just come back,” he says.

It’s cold outside today, the virus is surging, I have no cash.
Like some unhinged sovereign in a well-warmed castle, I wave the man away.
An Amazon van stops, motor idling. The driver jumps out,
Clutching some gift for us. The two men pass on our stoop.

In my study, the cat wakes and purrs onto my lap.
When a neighbor first brought her to our door,
We let her in, fed her. After that, she went out but
Always circled back, became part of the household.

Gift exchanges and cat-shaped dents on pillows: rings of love,
Of kin. Outside them are well-buttressed walls, locks on the doors.
Though we call each other by name, I never invite the unhoused man inside.
We talk, I thrust him cash or outerwear, I turn away.

Last year the cops shot a different unhoused man, asleep
In a nearby bank lobby. He had a weapon,
They said. I imagined Franklin, the man I know,
Curled around a baseball bat, dreaming his own protected enclave.

—Submitted on 01/11/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Rachel Ida Buff is the author of A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move / A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento (Fordham, 2020), with Spanish translation by Alejandra Oliva. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Nation, Aeon, The Southern Review, The Minnesota Review, Jewish Currents, and other journals. Buff is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she directs the Cultures and Communities program.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

Jade Yeung
I Consider Blocking My Mom Until the Presidential Inauguration

—Submitted on 01/20/2021

Jade Yeung is pursuing an MFA at Rutgers-Newark, where she is a Trustees Fellow. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Yeung is the child of Toishanese immigrants.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value A River Sings, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

Sandra Shagat
Empty Saddle Trail

I take you on a path I’ve found to
show you the peacocks that strut wild
on Strawberry Lane, introduce you to horses,
so many horses—young horses, old
horses with sunken spines,
small horses, tall horses, big
horses with bellies as thick as steer,
white horses, Palominos, one you christen
Black Beauty, of course, Chestnuts,
a brown and white Paint.
I lay it all out for you like God—
like a picnic—acres of backyards that end at stables,
fill your nose with green hay and horse shit
and horse sweat. I lead you through
the rolling hills where there are no houses
to be seen. In the dark gullies,
the temperature drops 10 degrees—you agree
you can feel it. The only plane overhead
is a low-flying one from Louis Zamperini Field.
The strangers we meet along the way are pleasant
as people are who live in white homes and
venture outside on a sunny day between the holidays
to pull the trash bins back in.
Outside a house under renovation,
a man leans alone against a pick-up truck.
I’m sure it’s his family we saw earlier—
we passed them on the trail—
maskless kids who ran down the hill counting horses
their own hair tossing like manes.
So, we’re all doing the same thing:
passing through a life we can’t afford.
You work it out aloud as we walk:
how much it would cost to pay a mortgage plus
taxes here, how much to keep a horse.
Near the end, we find a row of citrus
along a split-rail fence and
let our daughter scamper like a baby
ape for fallen fruit. She rises from the dry
streambed with six lemons and three Mandarins.
You decide you’d rather have a boat.

—Submitted on 01/19/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Sandra Shagat holds a BA in English from Cornell University, and an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford. Raised in a small town on the Jersey Shore, Shagat lives with her family in the suburban South Bay of Los Angeles, where she works in corporate communications.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993.