Jeffrey Joe Nelson
The Voices
When the street sweeper comes
an army of ants scatters for cover.
Flowers bend colorful heads
& silently pray for rain.
A line of people wraps around the block.
They watch the steel bristles whirr.
Three fire trucks & an ambulance pass
screaming like a child’s bad dream.
Buildings rise out of the concrete
& keep rising till the skyline
is filled with a million voices
filling the air as if an invisible ash
were slowly drifting downward
piling up in the streets
like verbal snow, covering
everything in knee-high drifts
of voices.
Snow Spell
It hasn’t snowed in months & yet a painting on the wall above the bed spells S... N... O...W... in large
black letters above a blurry white field inflected with blue-grey swirl.
On the floor, inexplicably beside the fireplace mantel is a similar painting with the word C... L... O...
U... partially spelled out towards the lower left corner.
There is not a hand in sight.
Without any warming a single dark & crumbling “D” is lifted into the upper right corner where it
floats as if a solitary bird
were attempting to escape the flock
Jeffrey Joe Nelson hosts the Greetings Readings Series at Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. His Road of a Thousand Wonders was published by Ugly Duckling Presse.