Poetry: By Biman Roy

BLUES QUEEN

When they moved her down the stairwell
Step by step, halting and panting, on a stretcher,
The pavement was heated up by then.

Jimmy was playing the lonesome blues somewhere.
A note from the wayward sax kept rolling down
As she moaned in pain—
A sharp stab at the edge of her rib cage
That holds at bay a mottled liver,
An estranged spleen
And a love-struck heart as well, for years.

When she was lifted into the ambulance
Droplets of sweat clustered around the lids,
The street empty of desire,

The howling of blue wind made her lips crack
And as she entered the ER with sunken cheeks
And half-closed eyes, she wanted two things dearly,

A sip of cold white rum
And Jimmy playing Leroy Carr—
“How long, how long has every train been gone?”

A FERRY RIDE ON THE CIRCLE LINE

On the shiny breast of undulating water
A shadow green and broken up
The iconic Mother of Exiles

The boat shifts in its passage
We lean back on the seats in taut air
And clutch at the edge of our jackets

There has to be an Ellis Island in heaven—
You say
Yes I nod as long as there are
Refugees of heart
You smile lavender scented

Beyond the ultramarine shores
Of Lesbos in olive gardens
Immigrants become migrants
And their despair runs into the streets
As blood runs into sand

How the words change their meaning
When you choose to be silent
Known becomes unknown

Yet we know grief is not a winch
And a groggy unkind night
Is safer than a shrapneled day
As they wait near the gate

With anger spreading in the chest
To guard against
A vainly barking tongue

Now we have come full circle
Stepping on the West Side Highway
You say
As you cut rose bushes harder
They blossom more

ONLY HERE

Superheroes are born in New York
Because of skyscrapers and elevated rails
As I have been told

Most of them have Jewish immigrant parents
And a phosphorescent crowd hunting excitement

When I walk in the shade of a side street
A pizza deliveryman bicycles past my dreaming self
With a red-and-blue cape and a young woman
Wearing a blooming magnolia blouse bends over
Through her second-floor window and reads
From Finnegans Wake loudly to the crowd below

A man walking in front of me calls his dog Robin
And waits until he is done and wraps it in polythene
Like precious Kryptonite and at Union Square
The new mayor promises the world to his citizens
Despite war and Washington

The boy is Albanian and the girl only speaks Creole
And they meet for the first time in the E train from Queens
And on a day when trees on the sidewalk turn color
He holds her close looks up at the sky and says
Help us Superman
And the girl’s singing breasts

Far more sweetsounding than a lyre

Golder than gold

**(Editor’s Note: Due to the formatting of our website template, the last lines of this poem were unable to be printed in the format that they were submitted.  Included below is a photograph of the last stanza in the format that the author intended.)

POET AND THE PREGNANT WOMAN

Across from the Plaza Hotel
Where a bronze horse leaps into air
A boy in blue jeans maps the sky.

Lifting up their rears
Black ants take shelter
Under pages of the New York Post,
On its top a homeless man darkens the cloud.

Soon it will rain.
A very pregnant woman
Flaunts her belly swollen as Hudson Bay
And waits for the light to change,
So also a poet,
Who does not have to cross
This street or any street for that matter—
Waits for words to rain
In thunderous silence
That will run wild and naked
Through their veins
Giving birth to another Apollinaire.

THAT SEPTEMBER

At Ferry’s Landing—
Cranks of machines cracking marrows
Of American lindens
Fill the air
And at Ground Zero, the eternal digging.

No one knows
Who tends the cattle in Ithaca
Or who serves coffee in the downtown Starbucks
At these hours,
When wind is still as a stroke victim.

The soggy September trench coat
Folded as memory of troubadours
Left close to the street sign bent backward
And a stench pooled around the hydrant.

Walking into the troubled night
Under a traffic-less sky,
I notice on dank pavement a half-rotted root
Sinking its teeth into the marrow of Manhattan.

Biman Roy has been writing poetry for past three decades and has been published in various literary journals in US, UK, Canada and India. These poems are taken from his manuscript, “Geography Of Bliss”, a collection of poems based on his interactions/reflections/interpretations of New York City, both as a physical and mental space/entity.