Lynn Hoffman
Lovers on Spruce Street
these two lovers are – if you could add them up – one hundred and fifty-six years old and about ten and a half feet tall together they are carrying the groceries home in bags proportioned exactly to their size and hunger. he walks curbside, as his mother taught him she tucks herself under his arm and their steps are together, together his hand is lightly on her shoulder and it flickers, molds the curve of her back with each step they take in step. the young folks hurrying up behind them are calculating how to pass and whether to flash the lights of their youth or beep the horn of their city cheerfulness and then a vision slows them down and some common wind takes them aback and into the wake of these two lovers. the young people see his hand in motion on her body the young woman's man sees a dying leaf trembling as it falls, afraid of the cold, the wind, the night the hand shivered – or did it flutter? was it dead, that leaf that dances along her back? the young man's woman sees a silver moth ripened, perfect, just as promised, the imago of some past worm of fleshy love.
Lynn Hoffman, Ph.D. is the author of The Short Course in Beer and the killer novel bang BANG.
