EDITORS’ CHOICE – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY
Neighborhood Report
by Julia Lattimer
The day after we read the Leda
poems in class, I am smacked alert by
WOMAN RAPED AT KNIFEPOINT
BY TWO MEN, ALLSTON.
At Commonwealth and Linden WOMAN
is pulled out of the dirty yellow street-
lamp light and finds her fingers pink
with fury against the cross-hatched metal
fence. Leda is a gold day-lily, outspread
and resting in the purple summer heat. The poets
soften Zeus’s feathers, and hold her nape in their beak.
Inside her, they engender a civilization changed
into something irreversible. But
in ALLSTON, The B Line will cross loudly over rust-
ed tracks in an hour, and the blade—indifferent—
lets WOMAN drop.
Julia Lattimer is a poet living in Boston, Massachusetts. She is an MFA candidate at UMass Boston and the Poetry Editor for Breakwater Review. She hosts a monthly queer poetry reading series out of a living room in Allston.