The Avenue of the Americas.

• Author: Ostriker, Alicia
• Position: Poem

Above the tongues of taxicabs, the horns and buyers the teeth of buildings grin at each other, the institutions of media medicine publishing fashion know how to bite through human flesh like hinged aluminum traps chopping the necks of beavers, or like logging rigs, those saws that go through a hundred year old redwood in about three minutes take out a thousand acres of virgin Oregon forest annually because loggers need jobs, intellectuals need the special sections of the New York Times stacked on driveways each rosy dawn, the Japanese need the splinters these pines and spruces finally get turned into, everybody needs what they can get and more. Yesterday walking between fifty-third and fifty-second on the Avenue of the Americas at twilight on my way to a good restaurant with good friends I passed three beggars. Wrapped in plastic. Why not say beggars? Why invent novelty phrases like "the homeless" as if our situation were modern and special instead of ancient and normal, the problem of greed and selfishness? The beggars turned toward me I put money in the woman's...