Strange Fruit
Where the plows can’t reach
snow crusts brick tenements in
a black-and-white photograph.
Outside the apartments
streetlamps glow like twin moons,
as if belonging to another solar system,
one where Billie Holiday didn’t die.
Still, the thin blade of her voice
keeps slicing, fragile and honeyed,
transporting me to a closet-sized
chamber redolent with beeswax,
illuminated by a single bare bulb
swinging from its cord.
Rebecca Hart Olander
originally published in Brilliant Corners
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