Explore "Two Women on a Street" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ This street is callous apathy / In a scale of greys and browns. / Its black roof-line suggests / Flat bodies unable to rise. / Even its screams are listlessness / Having an evil dream. / Its air is swarthy rawness / Troubled with ash cans and cellars.
/ An old woman ambles on / With a black bag that seems part of her back, / And a candidly hawk-like face. / She croons a smothered lullaby / That sifts a flitting roundness / Into her sharply parted face. / Then she surrenders her hand / To the welter of a garbage can. / A hugely wilted woman slinks by / With a cracked stare on her face. / Her eyes are beaten discs / Of the lamplight's ghastly keenness. / She glides away as though the night / Were a lover flogging her; / Glides into the callous apathy / Of this street, like one who cringes / Happily into her lover's hallway.