This week we are proud to feature MRB Chelko’s [rain pours on the unsold umbrellas] from the series “MANHATTATIONS.” This poem is previously unpublished. Chelko is a recent graduate of The University of New Hampshire’s MFA program and Assistant Editor of Tuesday; An Art Project. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including AGNI Online, Indiana Review, Washington Square, and Verse Daily. She has two chapbooks, What to Tell the Sleeping Babies (sunnyoutside, 2010) and The World after Czeslaw Milosz (forthcoming from Dream Horse Press).
Author’s Note:
[rain pours on the unsold umbrellas] is the 13th poem in a book length series of New York City poems I wrote upon moving from Somerville, MA to Central Harlem in the summer of 2010. I was, at the time—and still am to an extent—thoroughly overwhelmed by the city, my life, poetry… the series was my attempt to engage my life in real time, and, of course, to add my own whispered harmony to the wonderfully cacophonous and mind-bending chorus of New York poems already in the air.
f r o m M A N H A T T A T I O N S
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rain pours on the unsold umbrellas
hook-up in the bin across the street
three stories down from my window
bright fabrics smashed so tight together resemble
the speckled balls of clay
I rolled as a child across the table
picking up stray color chunks
this is cleaning
this is how new worlds are made
just watch the rain
now two identically breasted women
purchase an umbrella to share their lives beneath
my dog hops on the windowsill
to near them
a sparrow is it
a sparrow
trembles raindrops from its wing
a tiny weather system
in the foreground
my tea steams
with a heat that burns from
what must be
an old place
my eyes
bless the street
the fire escape steps
I must believe
glisten for me
