Two Poems by Daniel Donaghy

Two Poems: Daniel Donaghy

Man Found Dead on the Huntington Street

El Stop Steps

Below 20° all week. Too cold to snow. Air gusts to the face were glass breaking. Frozen black slush fused to stripped cars and empty storefronts and the wide-open El stop gates. A block from a shelter and soup kitchen. A block from the hospital. Down the street from a Catholic church. He shot up on the bottom step how long before he died? Half a day? Half an hour? Was his last fix laced? He pressed his bare forehead into a wall tile and drifted off. His eyes were stuck open. So was his mouth: both front teeth were broken. His long brown hair had fallen aside enough to reveal that he had an infinity symbol tattooed at the base of his neck. He was wearing a Rangers jersey. He’d twirled the handle of a yellow plastic shopping bag around his right wrist. He became a stone for commuters to step over or walk around. A trash can. A turnstile. After a while, you stop seeing. So many curled in blankets. Cops chase one away (hardly ever), another settles in. Most clutch a cup, wear a sign as a necklace: Anything helps. The dead man froze slowly far from anyone who loved him. Who knows who loves him still, who remembers him as a child, who’s waiting for word? He was not from around here. Will his family ever find out? This won’t make the papers or the news. This will happen again. Say Kensington and watch Philadelphia shake its head. Kensington is a drain clogged by the city for thirty years where fetid water pools and people’s lives end often enough on the Huntington Street El station steps for locals to name them The Death Steps. The new mayor promises a flush, a clean start, but where will the water rise next? Who will name the

DANIEL DONAGHY

drowned? Who’ll see who can be saved? Who will do more than hold firehose photo-ops declaring the area clean, then smiling, problem solved, at ribbon cuttings for new-money whiskey bars and thirty-dollar burger joints as the El screeches over their sleeping, moaning ghosts?

For Mikey, Who Danced in the Rain

I watched from the front window of our second-floor apartment as the storm swept toward us down Clearfield and Ruth Streets, over Rocky’s house on Tusculum, finally thumping Lehigh Ave with an angry sheet of rain. I heard our neighbor’s boyfriend Mikey before I saw him––cheering under our shared awning, then sprinting into what sounded like static, calling our block to join him, a stranger to most of them, shirtless, probably high, boxers riding the waistband of his pre-grunge shredded jeans. I wouldn’t have said it then, but in that moment, he was beautiful, free of fucks for anyone

who stayed inside and watched him spin and stomp within

a wall of water too thick to drive through,

every muscle in his bony chest and stomach taut, his long dirty blonde hair twirling with him

on that once-or-twice a-summer evening

when for twenty minutes the sky breaks open and lightning splits the clouds between thunderclaps

over the railroad and El tracks and shuttered Y and then is gone, like Mikey was gone

after that night on Albert St., like I and everyone

we knew is gone from that block that’s now a tent city

of empty lots and boarded houses. Heavy rain still brings

Mikey back, brings back Philly and my parents younger than I am now, brings back friends who didn’t make it even to Mikey’s age, twenty-two, and the storms that somehow missed me, but swept them one by one, fighting, swearing, middle fingers raised, into the dark.