Ghostlight River
A prose poem of asphalt and ash
I walk the boulevard as if it were a cathedral, my heels the toll of a bell echoing over cracked concrete altars. The wind tastes like burnt sugar and sorrow, carrying scraps of voices, fragments of prayers muttered into disposable cups. Here, under the bruised plum sky, the streetlights hum like forgotten hymns.
I am a city stitched from broken things — subway graffiti and the sigh of strangers pressed together on 6-train mornings. The ghosts here wear fur collars and cigarette smoke, their laughter shatters like glass in my marrow. In every cracked windowpane, I catch my reflection: part feral, part forgiven, all flame.
Even the pigeons know my name, cooing elegies as I pass, my shadow long and liquid against the brick. The scent of a bodega — spilled coffee, hot grease, roses wrapped in plastic — clings to me like a lover I cannot forget. A man on the corner plays saxophone, his notes carving graffiti into the night air.
I carry a city inside my ribcage, skyscrapers piercing the sky of my lungs. My breath is smog and poetry, my heartbeat the hollow clatter of subway doors. Do you see it, too? How beauty rises from the rubble, how asphalt can cradle a miracle?
I wear my history like a second skin, soft leather worn thin at the elbows. I was forged in the fire escapes, in the smoke of summer hydrants and the neon blush of a corner liquor store. These streets are not just mine — they are me, pulse and pavement, brick and bone.
And when I reach the river, I kneel, baptizing my hands in its diesel-tinted currents. The water whispers stories to me, secrets that shimmer like oil slicks in moonlight. “You are here,” it murmurs, its voice endless and unbroken. “You are here, and you will burn.”
© Ani Eldritch, 2025.
Thanks to Edward Swafford and his team at Black Coffee Poetry for hosting my work.