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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Maxwell Bodenheim

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Streets

Maxwell Bodenheim

From “Charcoals”

ROWS of exact, streaked faces,

Each afraid to be unlike the other,

Recalling the rows of people I have bowed to.

(O bare yellow houses, let me batter different shapes into you

With cracked knuckles!)

Glass globes on signs and in shops, with a light not their own,

Recalling the small souls that festoon the streets of my remembrance.

(Oh, let me place you between large thumbs

And break you to showers of falling splinters and sparks.)