2. Did the police ever recover the stolen backpack?

by Alexander Greenberg

i

A stray dog found it first. Buried its snout

in the dark nylon and turned wolf. Black-gummed.

Between clenched teeth, he carried it down

Arthur Avenue, ribbing the zippers against

the metal shutters of every foreclosed dime store.

Arched in the hunger of a full moon. Light breaking

over the shoes of all the alley-way gangsters.

I mean pranksters. A star for each of them

riveted forty light years away in the purse

of some black hole. Look: The steel glint

in their eyes.

I mean knives.

ii

A schoolboy spots it puckered by the curb,

punches it open & climbs inside.

Finds $700 and a shot polaroid.

Takes a picture of the darkness

to make it any smaller. An hour passes,

then a year. The winter months

freeze the backpack’s seam shut.

Its zipper, split off, teeters on the bars

of some nearby gutter.

Gnarled like a knocked-out tooth,

the kind a mother wouldn’t dare to lay

under her child’s pillow.

By now, the schoolboy has stopped

searching for a way out. An officer comes by

the next morning, gives out his back trying to sling

the weight of a life over his shoulder.

He empties the backpack onto a conveyor belt

at the police station. The camera, then

the credit card. The Ipod, then the boy

with dollar bills in his teeth.

The officer stays until dawn,

but nobody claims its belongings.

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