Five Brief, Loaded Poems by Berkeley Street Poet Julia Vinograd

A middle-aged man with a dented straw hat
a pot belly and shorts
waters his front lawn with an air of defiance
as if he were challenging the gods,
both hands clenched tight around his flailing hose.
The gods hit him with the daily news, bills,
his daughter's dreadful boyfriends
and he fights back with heavy water
like a custard pie lobbed over the gates of heaven.
He doesn't give a damn about his lawn
but a man's got to do something.

I’ve got this sawed-off illegal poem
pointed at your head
and you’d better believe I know how to use it.
I’ve got my back to the wall
and don’t care what happens
so if you get in my way, buddy,
you’re gonna get shot up full of words.
I’m not gonna warn you twice.

There's a wrongness in the air, a smog of the soul.
The dictionary started coughing and coughed up blood
delicately as a heroine in lace dying of consumption.
The music is sorry for her
but there's nothing to be done.
The signs saying Dead End don't just mean streets.
The living in their ordinary clothes haunt the dead
and the dead laugh.
We stub our eyes as easily as our toes.
It hurts.
There's no band-aid for bruised smiles.

Old man
drags his feet after a cane
slowly.
Light changes
half way across the street.
Cars screech to a halt,
lean on their horns,
yell out their windows,
give him the finger.
If anything
he slows down.
He's old.
He can barely
haul himself up the curb.
His grandchildren don't write.
But shiny new cars wait trapped
as his cane takes its time.
They hate him.
It makes him young.

I never wanted children.
Growing up I couldn’t even keep goldfish alive.
Suppose a child coughed at night
and I didn’t get it to a doctor in time?
There were enough parents who knew what they were doing,
I didn’t trust myself.
But now all those children wrenched from their mothers’ arms
crying in the night.
Are these my children somehow, the ones I never had
who need me? They have real mothers they’re crying for;
I know that.
But why do my breasts ache
when I hear them cry, my old milkless breasts?
Why?