Soho Cinema

The woman who lives at 830 Broadway
walks her infant at twilight
through the neighborhood streets
warehoused fashionably ugly
200-dollar silk blouses where hammers once hung
between the cafés and loading docks
chemicals bloom like wild roses in the gutter
her child in the tattersall pram
with an anti-nuclear sticker
takes it all in as possible
in an urban parlor.

Does she promise her daughter a life
on this island easier safer
than the ones they rush home to peruse
26 stories up over a bay
that is dying
the complex
double-crostic of this moment’s culture?

When the six o’clock news is over
does the child pat her mother’s wet cheeks
does she cradle her daughter against her
and weep for what she has seen
beside the bed under which they are lying
deathstink in the mattress
her son bayonetted to the door in Santiago de Chile
a corolla of tsetse flies crusting her daughter’s nose
army hippos fire into the mourners
across Bleecker Street
blood on her Escoffier knives
blood welling in her garbage disposal
her baby’s blood obscuring the screen
their next decade in living color
wired from pole to pole
when the six o’clock news is over
does she weep for what she has seen?

Or does she will her orange rebozo
with the Soho magenta fringe
to a Vieques campesina
six children and no land left
after the mortars
and the Navy
sailing into the sunset.