Neighborhood Report

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.