The car alarm jabs the neighbors awake
every fifteen minutes when its bark
sets off the strays in their chorus
of call and response and the supermarket
down the block has an alarm, too; it throbs
like a synthesizer overlay on an old disco track,
but the neighbors don’t dance except for
the young couple across the street who hustle
out on the stoop to the rhythm of their
raised voices, the angry tempo of go ahead
and do it, of big man, of bitch, while
sometime traffic on Broad Street whispers
its wheels on asphalt to hush its roll
through streetlights’ amber cone before the siren
song of the EMT’s carting someone in the truck
to the ER on the other side of town while neighbors
wish, maybe, that they were in one of the planes
overhead, the belly-lights sly wink like
saying, You know this is all bullshit, right?
before it screams down onto the runway
at the airport across the river – or perhaps it’s
the ringing they hear borne in the brief quiet
of their own bedrooms, the brazen scurry
of blood through their ears’ capillaries, the rattle
of breath only they can hear like a dream
they can’t quite rise from, a song almost recalled,
its ancient refrain on a loop they can’t shake,
in the mystery of sleep, awake, a puzzle, impossible,
like how, after all, day breaks without a sound.
Chris Ritter is a Philadelphia native living and working in a South Jersey suburb.
