Susan Diridoni

awakening in "The City"

our mornings strewn with toast, the radio on, all the pop icons of the 50's forever in our minds, curtains perpetually pulled back so that the sun would be ever pouring through the east windows, there would always be music in our minds but not mornings strewn with toast

blinding sun
refracted by the toaster
a young retina aches

in the late 60's we collected rose hips, the petals pulled & falling along our walk to the long bus rides to high school, winter mornings a riotous yellow bursting through but more often overcast-gray, but winter dusks could be something special, that reddened west silhouette, that blazing thin lip of last light and then the rosy west balanced between a deepening blush & the cobalt sky, poetry was in my mind

tiny daisies
in the grass overcast
but music the kiss

down the stairs at City Lights Books for the poetry the pamphlets the broadsides, espresso coffees showing us how cosmopolitan The City was & had always been, and a spaghetti factory with their rufino wrapped in basketry was next-door to poetry readings in North Beach, these were the nights, and the weekends stretched along the "Panhandle" and then poured into Golden Gate Park to boycott grapes for La Huelga, to resist a war, to end a war, assassinations were in full swing, Haight Street flowering just five blocks away from my Catholic girls' high school, while Nina was enunciating how beautiful black is and Coltrane was still unfurling his love supreme … almost innocently to a budding Irish friend

"fat-legged lady"
just meant a white woman
relieved, just barely