Linda Benninghoff

ST. PAUL STREET*

So many of us who came
to this red row house on St. Paul Street
lay in bed at night
looking out the window at the stars.
We ached with the darkness,
wanting all we could not have.
Leaving home and family,
we came here to recover
from depression, mixed up lives.
One sultry afternoon
I told you how lucky you were.
You whispered to me,
"I have a boyfriend, but I'm not lucky."
Yet we envied you.
None of us believed
you would throw yourself off the five-story house.
The next day three gulls disappeared
behind the building
returned, curving in the air.
The sentences I squeezed out were hollow.
The words weighed on each other.
Every word ached.
I could not grasp my sorrow.
Words fell down
like houses of cards,
one unleashing pain into the next.

* * *

SPRING IN THE CITY*

The white blossoms feathered the edges of the streets.
The bellies of the new leaves
were bloodshot
and we lay awake three nights
on the grass in the dark park,
the spring sharp in our mouths
like a knife,
while around us,
all the roads leaped,
the gray gulls
rocked up close, mewed
at the distant sky
When you left me.
I sat still for days,
watched a friend's face change,
smile, ease, then stop smiling,
a beggar drink
and a sparrow
from the same stream. There was no silence
in my mind.
My thoughts ticked accurate and dull
as a clock,
and time lapsed
like a broken horn
with only a little music left,
bleating.

* "St. Paul Street" was previously published in The Journal. Both poems appear in Benninghoff's recent book Whose Cries Are Not Music.

Linda Benninghoff attended Johns Hopkins University where she was an English major. She got a Masters in English with an emphasis on creative writing. While living in Baltimore, she trained to be an advocate for the disabled, and used this skill when she worked as a journalist. Her first full-length book, Whose Cries Are Not Music, has a section in it on disability.