Six Snapshots of Social Life
The conversation downstairs blurs, rises,
falls; politely meaningless exchanges
swiftly disperse. Up in the bathroom, a
woman weeps, checks the mirror, mends her face.
Two strangers in a bar found they both watched
the same TV series. They had different
favorite characters and one despised the
finale. So, they drank up and left.
It’s noisy in the Food Court. He totes
his tray to the table where she sits with
her roommates, who will never forgive him.
She peeks up but won’t dare to say his name.
After Ben’s cousin’s bar mitzvah, Rabbi
Wise closed in on him. “A Catholic girl?
You do know I can’t perform the service.”
Ben gave his best Yiddish shrug. “So who asked?”
The dogs are more pleased to see each other
than their owners, who sit singly on benches
watching their darlings run free, leap about,
just pausing to pee and smell out new friends.
Once we were sure it was true, that he was
gone at last, we rushed to the streets, the square,
singing, dancing, embracing. One pretty
girl tore off a young cop’s hat, gave him a kiss.
To read more articles by the same author, click here
About the Author
Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published seventeen collections of short stories; two books of essays; two short novels; three books of poems; stories, essays, and poems in a variety of journals, and a novel awarded the Indie Book Awards first prize for fiction.
