Dried golden thistle in the emptied lot
stone bower vacant of passersby

On the street a man gathers garbage
isolated in his neon vest
sidewalks away barefoot children
kneel on a trampoline
wires of electricity along the road like
steel-thin strangers

Next door a quiet woman stirs
a wooden spoon in a pot thick
with stew, tiled kitchen,
archaic lamp hanging

Is contentment a weightless stone?
Is it an untorn canopy?
A corner of the house that
nearly touches the train tracks?

Laura Salvatore is a poet living in Queens, New York. She received her MFA at The City College of New York. In 2022, Laura was a fellow for the Zip Code Memory Project, which sought to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus. She participated in the micro-residency Poets Afloat in April 2022 and was a work study scholar for the Poetry By the Sea conference in May 2023. Her poetry can be found in Movable Type, Pith Journal, Angel City Review, and The Marbled Sigh, amongst others.