Sherri O’Malley is a creative-writing student at Houston Community College. Originally from Pasadena, Texas, O’Malley says her work deals with “celebrations of unlikely beauty” and is intended to help readers “reclaim the overlooked nobility of urban life.” Her poems have appeared in the HCC literary quarterly Commute-ications, and she has performed public readings on Houston Public Access, at the Rice University coffee house, and on KPFT/90.1 FM. Morning on Blight Street is excerpted from a chapbook of O’Malley’s poetry, “Oooh, That Smell,” available from the author.
Morning on Blight Street
Dawn breaks freshless with coffee
On the breeze
Instant, granualized in steam
Poured forth from smokestacks atop
The neon-lit House
of Maxwell
After nightshifts afire like an urban
Texas City
Morning without end
Slack-wire mockingbirds belch sulfuric
Fumes into the chromed exhaust of idling trucks
Rumbling pavement trod
By anemic canines, rooting in gutters while
Watts upon watts of glittering Tejano waft
From the windows of squealing Firebirds
As I sit still on my sinking stoop
Sipping coffee
Instantly granualized in steam
Morning without end
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 1999.