Rachel Ida Buff
Pandemic Winter
The unhoused man who comes to our door,
Asking for money for food, for bus fare, or rent, when he has a place
Annoys my husband. “If you give him things,
He’ll just come back,” he says.
It’s cold outside today, the virus is surging, I have no cash.
Like some unhinged sovereign in a well-warmed castle, I wave the man away.
An Amazon van stops, motor idling. The driver jumps out,
Clutching some gift for us. The two men pass on our stoop.
In my study, the cat wakes and purrs onto my lap.
When a neighbor first brought her to our door,
We let her in, fed her. After that, she went out but
Always circled back, became part of the household.
Gift exchanges and cat-shaped dents on pillows: rings of love,
Of kin. Outside them are well-buttressed walls, locks on the doors.
Though we call each other by name, I never invite the unhoused man inside.
We talk, I thrust him cash or outerwear, I turn away.
Last year the cops shot a different unhoused man, asleep
In a nearby bank lobby. He had a weapon,
They said. I imagined Franklin, the man I know,
Curled around a baseball bat, dreaming his own protected enclave.
—Submitted on 01/11/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series
Rachel Ida Buff is the author of A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move / A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento (Fordham, 2020), with Spanish translation by Alejandra Oliva. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Nation, Aeon, The Southern Review, The Minnesota Review, Jewish Currents, and other journals. Buff is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she directs the Cultures and Communities program.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993.
