Rooming houses are old women rocking dark windows into their whens waiting incomplete circles rocking rent office to stoop to community bathrooms to gas rings and under-bed boxes of once useful garbage city issued with a twice monthly check and the young men next door with their loud midnight parties and fishy rings left in the bathtub no longer arouse them from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows and who was it who married the widdow that Buzzie’s son messed with?
To Welfare and insult from the slow shuffel from dayswork to shopping bags heavy with leftovers.
Rooming houses are old women waiting searching through darkening windows the end or beginning of agony old women seen through half-ajar doors hoping they are not waiting but being the entrance to somewhere unknown and desired but not new.