Poetry By James Finnegan

Joseph Gage CC




Amen Street


The stripped skeleton of a bike frame 
left chained to a signpost that doesn’t even say
Amen Street. No one claims address on 
Amen Street. The only church on Amen Street 
is a burnt-out hulk of limestone, a plywood
lid nailed over its rose window, it sees no evil. 
Amen Street runs all the way down 
to the wharfs, at a certain point you must get out 
of the car and walk as though at gunpoint 
right to the end of a pier. The water 
below green-gray with no visible bottom.
Staring down into the murk I recall
the year of a drought in St. Louis. 
The park lake drawn down to the lowest 
point anyone could remember.
One could walk out on the dried mudflat
that ringed its wind-chopped surface. 
Out on the flat, my brother and I found a boot 
embedded in concrete, half-buried in the lakebed. 
We tried to dislodge it but it wouldn’t budge.
When we told the adults at the picnic, 
they laughed, exchanged sly looks,
told us we should leave things alone.
Never expect answers on Amen Street.

​

​James Finnegan has published poems in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in the anthologies: Good Poems: American Places edited by Garrison Keillor; Laureates of Connecticut; Shadows of Unfinished Things; Waking Up to the Earth; and Of Hartford in Many Lights. He posts aphoristic ars poetica on the blog ursprache: https://ursprache.blogspot.com/