down these metaphysical
streets I walk naked & unseen

I am an outsider recognizable by
my camera eye stare
knapsack and long gypsy skirt
walking down Essex Rivington lower
east side New York

here is anywhere I’m walking down
those silent metaphysical streets
I’ve walked down too many times
lost and alone in
New York New Mexico New Orleans Colorado
forgotten towns across America
dim lit, shadowy, as in some
noir cinema of another time
walked down the exact moment
I’ve walked, as now
down these hot July streets

a smell I inhaled in Williamsburg, the Bronx
a noveau poverty baked
into the bricks and sidewalk
vibrating with truck rumble car horn
blast children’s screams flying
thru salsa sounds melting hot
ice cream yearnings in the air;

want to tear off my clothes
forget I’m already naked if
someone bothers to look....

I pass a group of tattooed Latinos
giggling teen age girls
hormonally bursting out of white shorts
a man reading the want adds on a stoop
dreaming new world in the old Spanish tongue

walk another block and come
to an impasse: a truck and crowds
blocking off the street, low budget
film makers here to steal something to
bargain for that original dream

too many depressions wiped away
for it ever to vanish entirely
from imagination;
like love. What have I to bargain with?
except need? offer it to a passer by
who has that hungry look
I recognize

hey you,
cost only a few hours a few words

once on a Greenwich Village corner
in a hotel lobby
in cyber space, on a page
sulightlaughter tore up those streets
and once undressed past
where I thought possible
and once took years
could strike once again/make
poverty a word
tenemented in lower east side New York
where a job pays rent, buys enough
tacos and enchiladas to fill
a hungry belly banish it
from their lives

a town I’m passing through

ISBN 1-59661-007-7
28 pages $9
Linda Lerner was born and educated in New York City. She has published eight collections of her poetry: A Koan for Samsara (Ibbetson Street Press, 2003), Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2002), No Earthly Sense Gets It Right (Lummox Press, 2000), Anytimeblues (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 1999), and New & Selected Poems (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 1998).

She’s published in New York Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review, Onthebus, Louisiana Review, Black Bear Review, South Boston Literary Review, Ragged Lion Anthology, and others.

There's a brief review of Bowery in a zine called the Chronogram at http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2005/02/bookshelf/shorttakes.php
It a mag that comes out in upstate NY, near Woodstock.
The review is “Lerner's geographical turf is the Lower East Side, her emotional turf the defiant New York loneliness which refuses to give up hope in a city where ‘A jazz band out of Brighton Beach/is tuning up the July heat…’
She will return to the Colony Café as a featured reader in August.” (The Colony is a venue in Woodstock.)

I remember when I was in my teens I frequently ventured into New York from the tony suburbs of Long Island, to go “slumming” in the city. I remember seeing a young man sweeping the sidewalk outside a gone-to-seed bar in the Village. I asked him: “Is this the way to the Bowery?” He replied: ”Sadly,” and nodded his head dejectedly. So for me the Bowery with its flop houses, its discarded, broken men, its off-limits allure, has always held a certain fascination. When Linda Lerner sent me her new collection: “The Bowery and other Poems” I knew I was going to revisit this neck of the woods through Lerner’s well-honed skills as an observer and thusly, a poet. In the poem “Sixty” we visit a smoky Gin-Joint where a man of sixty holds on to the all too-fleeting youth of the youngish poet. Here--we have a portrait of a man as an open wound, and his object of desperation: “6...0 he said as though/ he couldn’t grasp the/sudden wound ripping/flesh sense of it./ His rock gray eyes never/ budged from where I sat;/all night in a boozy dark/ he clutched a woman’s/ last fling of youth/ like a tourniquet/ and wooed her girl-heart.”

Throughout this collection Lerner probes the love, the loss, the lovers, and the losers of the “naked city.” The Bowery, I hear, has changed a great deal over the decades. But the name the “Bowery” has a certain name brand recognition for a certain slice -of-life. This collection will help explain why.

Doug Holder/ Aug 2004/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass.