Waiting for the Parade

I still smell the garbage on 10th Street

Rotten bananas mixed with baby shit

spoiled milk marijuana mildew

Daily News covered in piss

Yellowing in the fading sun

Headline: Ford to NY Drop Dead

It was the third year of the Halloween Parade

An unseasonably cool night, the winding

crowd overwhelming the lingering stink

Mermaids, angels, scantily clad superheroes

danced between skeletons and puppets,

spirits and flasks warming bare shoulders

One guy dressed as a linoleum floor,

his partner as a mop and bucket

I don’t know if they survived

the new pandemic lurking in shadows

Sudden unexplainable losses,

strange blemishes on beautiful faces

Just like now, except it’s dry coughs,

fevers, tight chests, and fear

and it’s Trump to NY Drop Dead

and it’s almost the Easter Parade,

it’s almost Passover and tax deadlines

and school breaks, and Ramadan

We will not gather together this April

Tonight, we dance alone in our kitchens

Some of our friends have lost

their sense of smell, their sense of taste

Some of our friends have lost the war

We grieve together and cannot touch

In 1975, banana peels and Pampers

littered the 10th Street pavement

Today the streets are empty

The highways are quiet

I still smell the rotten bananas

and the shit-filled diapers,

the piss the wine the cigarette butts

Behind masks and gloves,

we wait for our parade to begin.

© puma perl, 03/26/2020

Puma Perl is a poet and writer, with five solo collections in print. The most recent is Birthdays Before and After (Beyond Baroque Books, 2019.) She is the producer/creator of Puma’s Pandemonium, which brings spoken word together with rock and roll, and she performs regularly with her band Puma Perl and Friends. She’s received three New York Press Association awards in recognition of her journalism, and is the recipient of the 2016 Acker Award in the category of writing. Her most recent books can be found by clicking here.

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