New York Shines
Can you believe you live in the glossy new towers streaming up, brighter
than the most giant of megascreen billboards
in Times Square and capped over those box city streets
filled with black and brown bags, some covered under cardboard
decomposing in full view and sometimes moving
in their slow rigor and mortis, to hold out a sign and ask
for your spare bills as you walk by
your face winched at the stench of urine,
And you walk back from your job to go up the silent steel
of this gilded apartment with the floor-to-ceiling gleaming glass and look down
from your perch and those who never help themselves
because you with the job and driver and degrees should know
how they are not good for anyone in our
rise-by-your-own-grit-and-bootstraps, story-book world.
Anyways, you have to get to work early tomorrow and earn your bonus
and so you open the window, look down again
and piss in the wind
Sumit Parikh is a poet from Cleveland, OH, whose work is shaped by his experiences as a pediatric neurologist, a son, and a father. He finds poetry in both the complexities of his work as a physician and the quiet moments of everyday family life. His work has appeared in I-70 Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Intima, among others. Some of his poems can be found at sumitspoetry.com. Sumit lives with his wife and daughter. He is currently part of a writing mentorship and workshop with Brian Evans-Jones, a former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers.
The Marbled Sigh 