Solstice
By Dotty LeMieux
It’s delivery day at St. Vincent’s Dining Room
men unloading trucks with bread, canned goods, day-old
everything for the homeless
and the not-yet homeless
hanging on by the skin of their teeth,
the ones who have teeth
and the ones who only have the skin
Scruffy off-white hair,
long brown coat like a cape
swirling around bony shoulders,
gap-toothed smile, a man
picks bagels one, two, three
from a giant plastic bag open on the sidewalk
The sidewalk not crowded yet,
the bagel bag still fairly full,
the man in the brown cape-like garment
has his pick, takes his time choosing
plain, seeded, onion,
maybe a spicy cinnamon one
to summon the spirit of the Season
Face lit up with his choices, clutched
in his two hands as he starts across the street,
hair blowing around his face,
cape billowing out behind his slender frame,
he is transformed into a Romantic poet,
reciting odes
in a proper British accent,
to adoring listeners
gathered in the glittering firelight
of the local pub,
his hands gesturing freely,
accentuating the high points
of his lyricism
Back on B St., he strides in front of my car,
stopped now to let him pass, to watch
his coattails fly in his wake,
like autumn’s last leaves
swooshing around us, into the street, launched
by winter’s first insistent breath.
I live and work in California as a writer, lawyer and campaign consultant. Previously I worked as a journalist in Cambridge Massachusetts and was part of the Second Wave feminist movement before moving to California and attending law school.
My three chapbooks are Let Us not Blame Foolish Women, Tombouctou Books; The Land, Smithereens Press; Five Angels, Five Trees Press. My work has appeared in Painted Bride, Rise Up Review, Tuck, Hanging Loose, Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review (FLAR), and other journals. In the 1980s I edited The Turkey Buzzard Review in Bolinas, California.
In 2016, I served as a Bernie Sanders Delegate to the Democratic National Convention. I have studied with poets Edith Jenkins, Joanne Kyger and Thomas Centolella and at the New College of California Poetics Program. My own website of advice and sometimes recipes for aspiring candidates for office, is www.thecampaigncookbook.blogspot.com.
Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash.