Liberty Street Poem by Antony Rowland

Macey's citified sprinklers cool models
working bikinis for your future jeans
while hawkers flog disaster off Broadway
with bites of images consuming the event
where the past is sky and prime estate:
these memorials' signature pools
are now clearly visible but do
not bring soil, cell cultures or snails
into Liberty Street. KERB YOUR DOG.
Hardhats snapple in annuated footprints.

No bushel experience here: the Staten lights
recede the ferry with its wake gulls past
Kioshk, Pagganck and Little Oyster
to an Island scrap-yard where the towers end
in a transferred zero of melted steel
and workers' tears. The bridge cinches the Heights.
In Bodies, full-on organs are preserved
in disturbing Chinese polymer-nerves.
Corporate headquarters shadow walkers
and Wall Street stiffens its Buttonwood lip.

Libeskind's wedge of light may yet not flood
pieces of high-heel shoes, a pair of metal,
as clear as the night is long. Span
the cables that spider the lattice to Ambrose
and Peking piers, the handshake
of Brooklyn. WE KNOW IT'S CALLED RUSH HOUR
but it is unlawful to cross the solid line
into understanding under NO STANDING.
Uptown, a trio of bald blue clowns
stretches the limits of performance art.