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Congress Avenue, Night
David Meischen

Lighting by Edward Hopper, odor of stale urine
wafting from the Trailways culvert, exhaust
from derelict buses bluing the evening shadows

where Jeannie and I hungered. We wanted
cracked sidewalks, tattered doorways after dark.
We wanted hubbub and churn, strobe-lit. We wanted

bass guitar throbbing in our lower lumbar
vertebrae: Shiva’s Head Band danced us out
of ourselves. Shiva’s Head Band launched

us to a layer of the stratosphere high
above the Vulcan Gas Company: spinning,
jostled—toes, knees, hips, hands—dizzied.

Three hours distilled into this breathless whirl,
we spilled, transfigured, into the night again,
traffic lights after midnight blinking red—

stop and then stop and then stop—an infinity
mirror, hypnotic, making magic with oddities
of our disguise: puka shells and motley tie-dye,

denim baptized in cannabis and sweat.
We wanted to shed who we were when we
arrived. We wanted to enter selves entirely

new. We believed we could. Unbelievers
otherwise, we knew angels looked after us.
We were cleansed. We were forgiven.

—
A Pushcart honoree, with a professional essay in Pushcart Prize XLII, David Meischen is the author of Anyone’s Son, winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Napalito: Stories is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, David lives in Albuquerque, NM with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.

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