Come on everybody, it’s a party on the longest commercial street in America!!!
by Eleanora Rowe
Dad took me to the record stores on Colfax just
to breathe in rubber and the mohawk gel
and I’d play at identifying Davis, Coltrane, Blakey:
the trumpet from the trombone.
You and I beat the sneakered sidewalk—here!
See the rhythm!
It is in the mouth of the dishwasher,
the spine of the sax,
sleeping like sisters where the curtains filter February
until it is no longer February.
In my high school graduation tee and your black dress,
I’ll spit out your coffee, blaze your name
on the billboard at Forest,
run when you say go.
This, like jazz, is the vitality of things.
We leave Pete’s like we always leave Pete’s, hands swimming
in the lights of a passing Toyota, and you tell me
what the secret is to make a really good grilled cheese.
In ways like this, we are not afraid to say “I love you” to each other.
Maybe in another life we could
make glory from Denver
like San Francisco to the beats.
But girls don’t suffer like poets; they suffer like girls.
Soon, we will leave this haze for another haze
and forget the longest commercial street in America. But for now,
kicking rocks off the sidewalk that never ends,
we are thinking about crazy things:
we could live in a commune, we could dance the whole road.
We’d be famous, I say, we already are: consumers of the greatest
and only service that the infinite winding thoroughfares
of landlocked America have to offer,
which is, of course,
somewhere to go.
Once in the early nihilism of high school
you got hung up on asking if I felt like a “member of society.”
Now I say: on Colfax Avenue, I damn well do.
