The Time in Fineview

Written by Danielle McMahon

40 years old

Pittsburgh, PA

Zeke calls himself the Mayor of Slant

because he’s never tripped over the impossible

snaking staircases on the North Side of the city,

never tangled a shoelace

or lost a housekey in the overgrown ivy

on his way to the ketchup factory.

He’s got time on his hands.

He waits for the 4th of July.

Zeke hobbles his potbelly

and a case of Iron City

to the lookout railing on Catoma St.

He turns his back, slumped

to the warped and rotting wood,

the houses tilted like birthday cake atrocities,

brick smoothed and sealed with generations

of thick paint and dull fingerprints.

Fineview is exactly what you think it is.

Zeke never contemplates

the naked geometry of Pittsburgh

laid out before him in postcard panorama.

He never contemplates

this city not yet of sky,

this city of murky riverbends

and hidden cokeoven honeycombs.

He props his bumleg in a curve

of the railing’s steel to watch the hubbub:

small lives in windows, small lives

on beaming yellow bridges and slant street corners.

What time is it, Zeke?

A kid on a kamikaze bike skids to ask.

Zeke doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know

how to tell

the time.

He shrugs and takes a swig—

got his wristwatch at Woolworth’s,

knockoff.

It’s flip, man, Zeke says,

third arm trips over seconds.