Barbara Edelman: Otsego Street


I left the alley and its dust. I left the white cat who was already gone.  I left the talkative crows, the smell of weed.  I took the bruise of theft. I took the cat-piss smell of eucalyptus, smell of smog, smell of self, smell of flat-land dwellers on days when your sweat evaporates before you see it, when the circular valley is a furnace and you conserve your movements like money, you walk as if you had no bones, you walk as if the air is water, though the only water is in the spiked scales of cacti or escaping through the pores of your skin.

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