City Street Vendor
after Lola Ridge
In the city’s relentless grip a woman stands with cart and goods her hands a map of labor and sleeplessness as she calls out to passersby with a voice that cracks like the sidewalks she’s stood on for years selling scraps of beauty and use to those who rush with faces bent to purpose her eyes a deep well of exhaustion and will
The wares she sells are tokens of a life lived in the margins of a city’s wealth a string of beads a faded scarf a brooch that shines like a faint spark in the grey of concrete and steel that seems to swallow all light and sound leaving only the hum of machinery and the distant thrum of a world that moves without her
I took from Lola Ridge her focus on social justice and the struggles of the working class, and applied it to a concrete scene of a city street vendor, using vivid and lyrical language to convey the vendor's exhaustion and will to survive. I drew inspiration from her ability to merge the personal and the political in her poetry.