The elevated train shook
and rattled his dank studio
apartment. A a cat sleeping next
to him began to buzz its own
body with purring. Indecipherable
words from a cranked up TV
next door hummed inside wall
studs and plaster-board. Somewhere
in the city, his former lover
snored, he knew, her nose
morphed into a kind of kazoo.
He listened past the dins
and thought he heard the rustle
& tap of cockroaches & now a
furnace pipe joined the noise.
hans ostrom 2024
