"Postcards to Literature"

 I've been working on my PhD proposal the last 8 months so poetry had to take a back seat, I've written lines and fragments but no substantial poem in a while. One of the books I am re-reading for my PhD is The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of The New York School of Poets by David Lehmann, in it he quotes from a late 1940s early 1950s memoir by Anatole Broyard about his time in Greenwich Village titled: Kafka was the Rage. Broyard mentions how all the poets wrote furiously in little notepads as if they were writing "postcards to literature," I thought it was such a great line that it inspired me to write a handful of poems, I may shoot for a sequence of 10 postcards. Here is a rough draft of number 3.

Postcard Three

Somewhere in this world

It’s raining and a short haired girl

sits and smokes on a wet fire escape,

glass of wine next to her,

open book filled with inner monologues

whisper the story, it rains, it rains,

she sips her wine, smoke floating upwards…