Some Mornings You Want to Live in an Edward Hopper Painting

It feels possible
to live above a cafe
in a quiet old town
or maybe on
the west side
of Greenwich St
near-vacant at 7 am
when the sun hits brick
like a cymbal.
It feels possible to be
the cymbal, to clash
at a yellow slant
then be calmed
by sawing waves
of cicadas filling
and emptying the
lot next door.
Maybe you hear
the blue clack of
heels approaching
over-lapping
your heartbeat
then pause and
you feel more
relief than despair
as they pass.

Marietta Brill’s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in wildness, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Radar Poetry, Hyperallergic.com, The Adirondack Review, The Rumpus, and others. Her poems were selected by Mark Doty for first prize in Brooklyn Poets’ Walt Whitman Bicentennial Poetry Contest (2019), and by Khadijah Queen as a finalist in the Inverted Syntax Sublingua Contest (2020), and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She lives with her family in New York’s Catskill Mountains.