Urban Youth

 by Tracy K. Smith

You'd wake me for Saturday cartoons
When you were twelve and I was two.
Hong Kong Phooey, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids.
In the '70s, everything shone bright as brass

When you were twelve and I was two,
It was always autumn, blue sky, flimsy clouds.
This was the '70s. Every bright day a brass
Trombone slept, leaning in your room.

Autumn-crisp air. Blue skies. Clouds
Of steam clotted the windows near the stove (and
Slept in the trombone kept in your room). You
Wrote a poem about the sea and never forgot it.

Steam clotted the window near the stove
Where Mom stood sometimes staring out.
I forget now what there was to see.
So much now gone was only then beginning.

Mom stood once looking out while you and 
Dad and Mike taught me to ride a two-wheeler.
So much was only then beginning. Should
I have been afraid? The hedges hummed with bees,

But it was you and Dad and Mike teaching me to ride,
Running a long beside me until you didn't have to hold on.
Who was afraid? The hedges thrummed with bees
That only sang. Every happy thing I've known,

You held, or ran alongside not having to hold.

Sai Tells a Ghost Story

 

by Soham Patel (while practicing some version of surya namaskar [aka sun salutations]) One morning in late 2010 I looked out my Pittsburgh apartment window where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plates Artist Lofts, and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of Friendship. I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live with—we would walk around, routinely meet the people. That early morning and only that morning, I saw out the window a figure of what seemed to be a like four- or five-year-old brown girl riding a bicycle up Friendship Avenue then fade away. How else I know I saw a ghost is the child seemed so composed, happy, and it was way too early in the morning for someone so young to be out riding alone. from Poem-a-Day, October 30, 2024

Mr. Myra Albert Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement

 by Susan Rich

Maybe it was the bicycle. The way her hips

rose up and up - as if directed straight to heaven - 

Like a Venus. And a banker's daughter - true.

Real original, this girl - a bicycle, a camera,

other newfangled tools. I sent her bolts

of cloth, overalls, and boots - anything to make her squint

her eyes and glance one day towards me - me: Fred

Wiggins of Wiggins bazaar - 123 Commercial Street.

More of a back-up boyfriend, for someone like Myra

her family would say. Everyone knew she was in love

with her own life: bareback rides, opera singing,

and the New York artiste nights. But I expected 

to live a little, too. And so if there were men

of Salem, Toppenish, Seattle, lovely and rich - 

who snickered at our last-season suits

and sequined gowns, who hinted not infrequently - 

that a husband should not be so happy

packing picture frames and mounting

photographs. Christ. They knew nothing.

from Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems

Rochester, New York, July 1989

 by Marie Howe

Early summer evenings, the city kids would ride their bikes down his

   street

no-handed, leaning back in their seats, and bump over the curb

of the empty Red Cross parking lot next door where Joe's car was 

   parked, and

John's white Honda, broken and unregistered...everything blooming,

that darkening in the trees before the sky goes dark: the sweetness of the 

   lilacs

and the grass smell...

And the sound on the front porch steps was wooden and hollow,

and up the narrow stairway stuffy, and dim, and the upper door maybe a little

open - and into the hall and left into his room: someone might be sitting

   there

reading, or sometimes only him, sleeping,

or lying awake, his face turned toward the door,

and he would raise his hand...

And the woman who lived below there played the piano. She was a 

   teacher, and

sometimes we'd hear that stumbling repetition people make when they're

learning a new song, and sometimes she'd play alone - she'd left a note

in his mailbox saying she would play softly for him. And those evenings,

when the sky was sunless but not yet dark, and the birdsong grew loud

   in the trees,

just after supper, when the kids wheeled by silently

or quietly talking from their bikes, when the daylilies closed up

alongside the house,

music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards,

and he might doze or wake a little or sleep,

and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed

and not know it was Chopin,

but something soft and pretty -maybe not even hear it,

not really, until it stopped

 - the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you've passed it.

From the book What the Living Do

Old Habits

 by Joy Sullivan

I wiped out on my bike yesterday. My ex was with me and helped me up and it was romantic for a moment in the way romcoms are romantic when the love interest leaps to the rescue in the wounded aftermath and gently dabs their lover's lip and fixes them up with bandaids and kisses: oh, this might sting a little. Except that this is real life and he spills the hydrogen peroxide all over the couch as he tries to bathe my bloody elbow and my torn up knee and I'm crying but not in a sexy way and we're not lovers anymore but still there's love. Not the fireworks kind, but the familiar and sweaty and honest type that carries you home and slaps a bag of frozen broccoli on your bruised thigh and accidentally calls you baby again - as if you might not notice. As if your heart doesn't thump like the tail of an old hound at the sound of her name.

Earth Appoints a Child to Make the Case

 by Kim Stafford

You guys are all dressed up! Is this your

dinner table? It's really big. Okay, so--

I was down in the woods near my house

minding my own business, but this voice

out of nowhere starts talking, talking to me,

starts teaching me this big word: "non-neg...

non-negosh...negosh...non-negotiable."

That's it. This change that's coming is 

non-negotiable. That's the whole thing

I'm supposed to tell you guys. The voice

said you don't seem to know that. Then it

went away, and I stood there in the trees.

So that's it, okay? The big change is just 

non-negotiable. Now can I get on my bike

and go home? My mom will kill me if I'm late.

from As the Sky Begins to Change

To Mars from Arizona

 by Alberto Rios

Saturday mornings were science fiction—
That is, on that day anything was possible.

We didn’t have to go to the movies for that,
Though when we did, we were introduced to ourselves

More than anything. Ourselves in rockets,
Ourselves taking chances, ourselves speaking to the universe.

Outside of the movies, we were still in them—
Our bikes were our rockets, our submarines, our jets.

But mostly, and first, our bikes were our horses 
In this childhood West, a loyal, red Western Flyer

Taking me everywhere, up and down, fast and slow.
Only later did I understand it was my own legs

That did it all. My own legs and my arms to steer,
My own small, mighty lungs to shout—

A shout that would later become a song.
When they weren’t horses, when my legs were tired,

When the shouts calmed down into just talking,
We bike-riders would sit, and find in that talking 

The gold we had been looking for, though we didn’t know it.
The gold was made of plans for Saturdays still to come—

We each had different ideas, but we all had them,
Speaking them confidently as if we were lions,

Deep-voiced and sure even in that quietude.
What would happen next was far away,

But even as we rested, something in us knew
We would catch the future no matter how fast it ran.

“This is a simple testament to our childhood and adult imaginations both, looking at how time allows us to see the same thing in more than one way. I grew up on the border, literally, but it was never one thing. This poem helps me to understand that the border wasn’t simply about geography, but about the border between today and tomorrow; between what we were doing and what we were going to be doing; the certainty of that hopeful and creative and powerful sensibility—‘I’ was in harmony with the bravado of ‘I am.’”
—Alberto Ríos