On Approaching the Brooklyn Bridge
BY ELVIS ALVES.
We walk the night with the summer’s breeze on our backs.
People line up to enter a building with music pumping out
its windows. The building used to be a church. Now it is
a disco. I think that there’s a party at a church that all are
invited to if they can pay the fee. We keep walking and talking.
The news and its politics stay in our heads. We discuss new
books we have read. Cars whiz by, making their own music.
We are not alone on the sidewalks. Night vendors offer finger
foods from countries we have yet to visit. We stop at a bar.
Watch the game on its television set. Someone in the group
calls it a night. I say that I want to keep walking. I do this
alone. The Brooklyn Bridge and its lights in front of me.
In Praise of Workers
BY ELVIS ALVES.
Remember the freedom train, how it travels
across the city, leaving noise in its trail.
And children running beside it. They want to
jump onboard and go somewhere far away.
Remember the freedom train, and the passengers
on it. These are working men and women who make
the city move with an energy that is unmatched like
their hands and feet—always moving, working to create
a better tomorrow.
Elvis Alves is the author of three full length collections of poetry and three chapbooks. His book I Am No Battlefield But A Forest Of Trees Growing (2018) was awarded the Jacopone Da Todi Poetry Prize sponsored by Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio. Bitter Melon was published in 2013 and Blackfish was published in 2022. His latest project is the chapbook This Is What I Know (2023). Poetry Magazine featured Elvis’s poem, Parchman Prison, in its February 2021 issue on mass incarceration in America. Elvis’s poetry has appeared in Transition, Sojourners, Caribbean Writer Journal, and other publications. Elvis also writes for the Good Men Project, an online site that calls attention to pertinent issues affecting our society and world and that seeks to redress these issues. You can find more of his work at elvisalves.com, and on Instagram @elvisalvespoet and X (Twitter) @eoalves.