DOUBLETREE LIZ

This poem was published recently in Main Street Rag.


DOUBLETREE LIZ

She's sixty now
and from Yuma,
moved here to Tucson
twenty nine summers ago
and got hired at the Doubletree Inn
on the switchboard.
She's worked there
ever since.
She lights up
forty cigarettes a day
and wheezes from the ten ghost-like paces
from her apartment door
to my cab.
I say good morning
but she only puts a finger up in front of her
cross-hatched agony
and rolls her gravelly mucous
up the hill to the back
of her throat
before raising a white handkerchief like a flag
of surrender to her lips.
We can never talk
until we get a mile
or more down Wilmot
towards the Doubletree
where construction makes
it stop and go, where between
puffing workmen
kettles of tar boil and
stink at ten a.m.
If she's able
Liz tells me stories
of a world clogged with bile
and privilege.
If I'm able
I wave her money away
like smoke.