The Crosstown Bus by Laura Foley

The Crosstown Bus

We board with our senior passes,
then we’re five Brearley girls chatting,
remembering Mary who lived on 86th,
loved everything horses,
and that movie we watched
at her house when we were eight,
black and white, with eerie music,
two climbers on a rock ledge,
one pulls a long rope to find
his friend on the other end, dead…
Artist Sarah remembers
Ellen’s magenta bedspread,
as she points to a lady near us
with a corduroy coat just like it,
all of us imagining Ellen’s leaf pattern—
Ellen, who lived on First,
and moved away, who owned
a Vermont bookstore, and died
last year, and now I’m remembering
her childhood apartment
with the elevator button NS,
how we pretended it stood for Nancy Snow,
her little sister, but I knew
it was really Non Stop, and how
they had a basset hound, what was his name?,
with prostate problems, everything
hanging low to the ground, and now
we’re roaring, five senior citizens giggling
as we cross town on a crowded bus
that takes us through our lives,
until we get off, at different stops.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.