Chinatown

The world is rubbed until it turns translucent.
The clouds enshroud the remnants of the sun.
I pause and press my palm against the window
and gaze a while before I head downtown.

*

The bus’s motion makes the raindrops quiver
like beads of mercury upon the glass.

Our breaths accumulate to mist the windows.

As we exhale, the city is erased.

*

I stop and wipe the moisture from my glasses
beneath the awning of a restaurant.
The captive lobsters pummel my reflection
like drunken boxers swinging taped-up claws.

*

A string of ducks hangs in a butcher’s storefront.
The neon bastes their plucked and glossy skins.

The wind cuts rippled notches in a puddle,
that world in which we dangle upside down..

*

Lethargic koi float through the upper stories
of skyscrapers inverted in the pond 

until the pouring rain dissolves the buildings
and melts the orange fish to blobs of gold.

*

A bulb’s transparent flesh grows brightly blinding,
its incandescent skeleton aflame.
The rain unveils the city’s hidden mirrors
that echo every street lamp’s sunny claim. 

*

Steam rises from a grating in the sidewalk
and cloaks the souvenir shop in a fog.
Its window crammed with swords and waving kittens;
good luck and blood go strolling hand in paw.

 

*

I pass a mural she once posed in front of,
a phoenix stretching out its flaming spurs.
My camera lens was wet and wouldn’t focus.
Our coals extinguished, yet this beast still burns.

 

*

A girl steps from a car with tinted windows,

umbrella spreading like a bat’s black wing.

Her swaying backside hijacks my attention.

My mind folds up. I can’t see anything.  

*

The brass pole in the strip club gets a rubdown
with disinfectant by the owner’s dad.
Above the bar, a TV surgeon rips off
a nurse’s scrubs inside the x-ray lab.

*

A crow attempts to lift off from the gutter.
A carton of lo mein swings from its beak.
He hops and flaps, ignoring all the traffic,
can’t fly without abandoning his feast.

*

Entombed within a twilit basement tavern,
I gorge on fish and chips and gargle gin.
Unearthed potatoes, fish dug from the water,
and juniper exhumed, buried again.

*

Last call here in the underworld seems sudden.

Old Charon’s cab tools aimlessly around.

Poor Orpheus returns home empty-handed.

I’ve missed the last bus out of Chinatown.