Lawrence Wray: In Line at the Butcher

Papers blow and clot the gutters. The faces are those I’m used to from as long ago as Calabria, Donegal, and Kyiv. New arrivals are a year maybe from Juarez and again from Kyiv. I should ask how they knew when to run. Off the alley in a small garage young men from Guatemala work for hours on old cars with plates from Ohio and Virginia, hidden by the lifted hood and always quick to look when someone passes by. An old carpet has been left in the alley, rolled up, tied with twine and folded in half. I turn to memoirs of the Soviet era or of Germany for philosophers devoted to the Greeks, because I do not understand what people I have lived among. I look at neighbors, as if I had never seen them examining a loaf of bread at the market or pulling at their second-hand coats. Once it snows there will appear a thorny image of briars left behind on cobbles where crows have stood to tear at trash. People lugging bags of groceries step through doorways and dissolve. They leave me without words, despite the Greeks, for the ways they are swallowed by dim interiors and shabby stairwells. Without words for the ordinary beginning of tragedy, how it crinkles like plastic bags. How its coming is signaled by eyes that peer out of a sooty, ruined, narrow place. I have no expression for the pasty birds, featherless and headless, and for the tinge of watery blood in the meat case. Families are torn to pieces already and prone to scatter in the next storm that blows into the city.

Copyright 2026 Lawrence Wray

Lawrence Wray’s poetry has been published in Coal Hill Review, St. Katherine Review, Presence, Relief, and Poetry Salzburg Review. His collection The Wavering Fledge of Light was published by Wipf and Stock in 2023.