Beauty Supply
Sheaves of wheat in cement relief
Supply the beauties of Archer Ave.
Past the scaffolded brick church spire
We turn on the vacant corner lot
Through winds worthy of Hopkins (Gerard M.)
New words — Alexus — Everything must go
“Include everything in poetry”
Even the things you think are nothing
Like the way the new white snowflake
Decoration waves its wild tentacles
against the high blue sky
loop and angle
Black graffiti palimpsests the
yellow official sign of Danger
in bus stairwell
She stares at me unsmiling
with cold Northface
Notices me writing but says nothing
with her eye
The corner lot I used to chart or cheat in its ‘vacancies’
Configures new blown trash and walk through paths
Subjected to random search
Has grown a mouth of gravel
Constructed in a cone
Surrounded by temporary fence
Of blue nailed board
Now on Roti Avenue
Cutlery & Wang Quai
Amalgam of chairs,
Jamaica Island Center
Copyright © 2013 by Lee Ann Brown. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on October 18, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"'Beauty Supply' is a poem written as an accumulation of commutes to the school I teach at in Queens. The poem weaves interior thoughts, with exterior, experiential visuals through the window of a moving bus. Foregrounded is a language-sensitive tendency to 'sign-reading mode,' filtering real phrases flashing by, such as 'Beauty Supply' on a shop which sells wholesale to salons, yet transformed. Hungry for beauty in an urban landscape, the eye and the mind creates it, collage style, all in a whirlwind of motion and wind, with echoes of recent readings and overhearings mixed with the whirling signs and sights of Jamaica Center."
—Lee Ann Brown