Twilight’s Last Gleaming
/A. Z. Foreman
Away from piers the waters pity,
Away from mob-marauded streets
The last of the police retreats.
The prison empties to the city.
Senescent generals see no end
As their pubescent armies war.
The literatus keeps a whore
Like an imaginary friend.
The cleric bleeds on his white collar
For one last clerical mistake.
The killer feels the market shake
All value from a dead man's dollar.
The city's final strippers shill
A little poon for bread and booze
From listless men whose mitts peruse
A war-map of the Bronx until
The stone-old torch called liberty
Cracks from the statue's infirm grip
And the millennial waters rip
The rotten pier outright to sea.
Author’s Statement: This poem, like quite a few that are only now seeing the light of day because my girlfriend convinced me to actually try and publish, is very old. When I wrote it, MySpace was the biggest social media network and Netflix was primarily known as a DVD-by-mail rental service. I cannot now quite recall how exactly it came together, except that I wrote it after waking up from a dream.
A. Z. Foreman is a poet and translator pursuing a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Los Angeles Review, ANMLY and other outlets but do you really care? He does hope to one day be featured in the Starfleet Academy Quarterly and the Tatooine Review. In any case, he's most proud of having had his work featured in two people's tattoos. Most importantly, if you have a dog he'd love to pet it.
