A loud crack gets my beat-up vehicle of indeterminate make
sputtering down the street.
Scarred brick
buildings, a square,
and in the interval, a parking lot.

Bricked-
up windows lend a stiff mood to what, at one
time, would have been a black bow-tie affair. Now it’s just a square

meal, courtesy of a few square-
shouldered Wall Street
mergers. One
might more nonchalantly make
eye contact under the dimly lit street-
lamp where Lot

lost his wife. I’m talking about the same Lot’s
wife who turned into a brick-
faced pillar of salt when she stepped one
dainty foot across the line into a macro

precipitation of thermal brine. Hot showers of brick-
bats in the hummocky lot,
so I keep to the center of the street,
move on to the next black square.

Copyright © Kate Schmitt, 2007.

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Kate Schmitt works in the library of Middlebury College in Vermont. She has some recent poems in the Annual of Urdu Studies.