Stolen Food

When a staircase is a fire escape 

  …spiraled, and black cast iron

When a tarred rooftop atop an old tenement is home

  …where two young poor lovers sit, eating stolen food from a take-out Chinese stand

They laugh, they forgot the chop sticks; they pull up fried rice and scrambled eggs with homeless fingers…their mouths feel a rush of  momentary satisfaction… a few seconds of denial of no place to go to…

Their lives like broken feet so they can’t run to a better place…

The rain comes before they can embrace for the night...

In the back of their minds maybe the police will come for the stolen food, or for the break-ins, the stolen goods; or for the hours they prostituted their big city lives to suburban men.

They speak sometimes of these things, like once when they hid atop a building and secretly watched TV through someone’s window…a 1950s musical with endless legs. They couldn’t hear the music. Only those legs…and spoke of hope that someday, someplace, they could sing and smile…and dance faraway through puddles of Hollywood rain…

The shower came harder… they ran down the fire escape with aching feet. They wished they could slide down a marble staircase…but that was for the movies…at least the rice was good, and it filled their stomachs for a short time