The Sunday Poem: “Bebop Salvation” by Tobi Alfier

December 7th, 2024

The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work.

Tobi Alfier reads her poem at its conclusion.

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photo via RawPixel

Bebop Salvation

The vast and beautiful quiet of the weekend,
a weak dawn bleeds over the skyline’s edge.

She gropes her pockets to find a single cigarette
as she waits for that moment

when the street jazz trio sets up, each case open
for tips—bass, drum, and sax.

She looks like an accident, a leftover, a throw-off
from some bar across the tracks, where bottom-shelf

booze is the liquor of choice and no one knows
what white collar means. Some days someone

will throw her a twenty too, but they don’t know
this woman, her heart ripped out and tossed

like trash among the ashes, like a dump teeming
with gulls, broken yet grateful for the music.

On rainy days she lights a candle, sits in church,
listens to the brush of water against stained glass

like the brush of the drum she listens to now,
wavy patterns of rhythm and it’s a prayer,

bearing the weight of all her sorrows. Small birds
sing their small secrets in a language no one knows.

You watch this woman dance her mysteries and she catches
your eye—her glance back to you is stone.

Listen to Tobi Alfier read her poem

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Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Washington Square Review, and others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Listen to Marian McPartland play the Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn composition “The Single Petal of a Rose” [Universal Music Group]