Poem: Ocean Parkway at Night

Rabbis feed pastrami to their worries.
A truck’s horn won’t stop carping.
Pale kiosk lights refuse death.
Houses choke together
without lawns. Avenues tangle
without reason, and the elevated
bowels of the subway drip
sparks on an underworld of streets,
where station wagons cut
without warning, forcing squirrels
to hide themselves, murmuring,
in gutters, but the rats never stop
looking for food, and since
my Grandma Shisel cooks here
no longer, I must part the coarse
surf of Ocean Parkway,
wise as my father
before me.

Baruch November is the author of “Dry Nectars of Plenty,” which co-won Big City Lit’s Poetry Chapbook contest. He founded an organization to cultivate the arts called Jewish Advocacy for Culture & Knowledge, and teaches creative writing and literature at Touro College in New York.