Vox Populi
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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.
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How powerfully true: if only we would look behind the glitter and glamour of the society we think we live in, this is what we would see. Why don’t we look? Why don’t we consider those who don’t live in our neighborhoods as people like us? What beautiful writing.
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Very nice.
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The scattering of families… I’ve been thinking a great deal about that, and the importance of maintaining family connections, or not!
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Yes, for me family is everything.
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It’s the shit that happens to all, done to us by forces outside our own hopes and intentions. What happens to the every-day in the maelstrom of political decisions we cannot control. Everywhere. Despite the Greeks. The writing is so discreet, so devastating.
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Yes, a powerful piece. In line at the butcher, indeed.
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The featherless birds, families torn to pieces.
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Yes, The ordinary beginning of tragedy. Thank you Lawrence Wray, for holding us as we stand here.
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The poem has a perfect balance between the political and the elegiac.
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I’m especially taken with the layers of meaning behind “tragedy, how it crinkles like plastic bags.”
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yes, a great simile.
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