lisa low

Music Above the Rats

It wasn’t winter yet, but it was late and still
snowing. There was music playing,
which meant Orpheus was still in town.
We’d just moved in to a fifth floor walk-up,
and all I could think was Keats’s: “More
happy love! more happy, happy love!”
There was a starched-looking fire escape
that went off like a bridge into Manhattan.
It was odd the way I’d asked him to stay.
We were both divorced and in our thirties
and we must have figured: “What the hell,
one rib’s as good as the other.” It didn’t
matter that I’d never liked him. It was our
first night in New York and like a finger
snap on a ginger snap, all my fears of his
coming up short went away. When we hit
the streets, they were crawling with people,
and cars scratching back and forth like violins.
We locked arms against the night and studied
the art deco lights. It wasn’t like Boston
or Chicago. Architecture in New York
was always a disappointment. We went to
Brassy Maria’s and ordered fish tacos
at the bar, putting our feet up on the rail.
His boot nudged my heel as we held our
green margaritas up to look through ice
at the stars. Chet Baker was singing “Let’s
Get Lost.” We must have seen something
we liked in each other’s eyes because we
couldn’t stop looking, and as we listened
to the music, which shot like arrows down
the funnels of our ears, and stumbled to
the floor in each other’s arms, we decided
to free ourselves of the burden of clothes and
give ourselves up to the hopefulness of drowning.

Lisa Low’s poetry, reviews, interviews, and academic essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Broken Plate, BoomerLitMag, The Boston Review, Crack the Spine, Cross Currents, Delmarva Review, Evening Street Press, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Boston Herald, Litbreak Magazine, Phoebe, The Portland Press Herald, Potomac Review, Spillway, Streetlight Magazine, Tusculum Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Virginia Normal, and Aphros Literary Magazine, among others. She is one of the editors of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. She received her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Colby College in Waterville, Maine; and Pace University in New York City. In addition to her work as an educator, Low was briefly a film and theatre critic for Christian Science Monitor.

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