The room is half full. A slip of a schoolgirl in a dance class from Flatbush, AWOL from
her mother, finds her way to a small table in front, the band in the middle of
“April.” She doesn’t know, hasn’t the slightest inkling,
years from now she’ll be almost 200 pounds and limping up to the podium...
While the brown man talks to her through his horn, dark skirling phrases like a snake
with wings. The drummer fills the gaps with small bursts of snares and cymbals, the
pianist whispers along the keyboards, and the horn goes on without repeating himself
finding new ways to say the same thing.
He too doesn’t know he’ll be dead in three years, in a Paris hospital
where no one knows his name, diagnosed incorrectly, given the wrong drugs.
When the band breaks for intermission, she slides out the back to an alley between
tenements for a smoke. He’s already there toking on a joint he offers to her.
They don’t exchange a word but their eyes meet as if their own arrangement
that lasts all night.
When he vanishes, she counts the days and eventually feels my little heart beating
inside her.
lives and writes in Mahopac, New York. His prose has been published in Still Point
Arts Quarterly, Sandy River Review, Still Crazy, and great weather for
MEDIA. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, American Poetry Review, Poetry Now,
Atlas Poetica, Bright Stars, Skylark, and several other poetry journals. In May
2015, Keibooks published flowers to the torch, Peter’s book of tanka
prose.
Peter is also a jazz pianist, having played in several venues in the greater New York
City area including The Black Whale and LeRefuge in City Island and Pete’s
Saloon in Elmsford, New York.
