silly.

OTHER FISH

A girl with a backpack on a cellular phone sighs;
between the exhale and the first consonant
a van barrels through her. And who knows
what the boy thinks, his line slipping from her voice,
her words sucked backwards through the wire?
Two hours from now he'll be drunk,
his slurred thoughts slobbering over motives,
why she decided suddenly to leave him
and hung up mid-word.

The phone yelps angrily from under a bus,
and she lays splayed like an asterisk
in the dreary sentence of Fourteenth Street.

-- Mike Doughty.