Kyle Laws

Downtown

On the corner of Pacific Avenue
and Lincoln stood Shamrock Bar
down from Atlantic Tobacco Co.
where I worked in the office
and kept books by hand
ledgers spread across the desk
a cigarette in the ashtray.

Days the Shamrock was almost
empty except a few people
who wanted beer with lunch.
At night the place exploded
onto the sidewalk out of
the best tavern in Wildwood.
It took years to understand when

someone called me Black Irish
with my dark hair and blue eyes
that it wasn’t disparaging of my
origins but as if I were Elizabeth
Taylor or Elvis Presley even
though I did not dye my hair
how totally downtown I was.

 

Not the persistence of memory but of time

Not what is contained in the moment
but what is rushed away
like a Timex on the wrist
when you are 12 years old
swimming at the beach.
What’s tucked into a canvas bag
and stays until late afternoon
at a sandwich shop on Sunset Boulevard
the road traveled at end of day to hear
Kate Smith sing “God Bless America”
over the loudspeaker while the sun
dips behind the sunken ship that was
to be wharf after its concrete body
transported soldiers back from war.

 

Of the Innocents

Rubens reminds me of London
where I first saw The Massacre
in Trafalgar Square in a museum
across from St Martin-in-the-Fields—
any field where it stood long gone.

Evening Prayer was unusual,
participants in need of supper
or money to pay for it. I was there
for the historic church and whatever
music could be heard.

I’ve never forgotten the inner-city feel
or how kind the priest was to the prayers.
All I knew was The Academy of St Martin-
in-the-Fields, not those who came
for a different substance.

 

Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Beginning at the Stone Corner (River Dog, 2022), The Sea Is Woman (Moonstone Press, 2021, winner of its 2020 award), Uncorseted(Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2020), Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence coauthored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). She is editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.