Eulogy for Boardwalk & Updraft

//

The windows were a special type
of drafty, sunlicked condensation wiping
its forehead through the street jazz, performers
strutting through the boardwalk, unpacking the city

with their fingertips. Washed out like a tide,
boysenberries hung, smothered in outgrowth, ripening as
men shattered their lungs for trills ripped out of their diaphragms.
We eavesdropped from the attic, the floorboards bolted and

snickering when we padded across their dented backs,
creaking 43 years worth of windy nights, the porch lights
swiveling like apricot vines outside, enveloped by the expanding roads,
the folk tambourine and saxophone riffs crawling up its leaves

to the attic. The wind fell in love the way
junebugs crowded under the ledge, rising
variance swishing around the Atlanta nighttime,
up and up and up as sequined women and stripe throated men

hung like lanterns from the taxi reef, up and up and up.
Bowing a gale into their shoulders and blushing ears,
across the flickering streetlights and pearled pavements,
as if it could reach the ground any faster, petal its phantom

body on the café footpath,
so fleeting,
conjoining its drafty fingertips to the boardwalk
for just a second.