Once, you could find one almost anywhere,
a small and unassuming refuge, and sometimes
the only shelter from a sudden downpour,
casting hard fistfuls of rain and hail against
the narrow panes of glass, tumbling down from
its small square roof, dimly-lit from within.
Sometimes it seemed the only refuge
from the constant clang and drone of the city,
the exact intersection of public and private,
a hand-me-down space that granted legitimate reason
for squeezing in close beside your first girlfriend,
stranded, shivering, calling home for a ride.
I can still feel the weight of those phone books,
suspended by cables, knocking at our knees,
the thick heavy receiver, the unexpected blessing
of a coin someone had left, mistakenly or not.
I remember most my sister, exiled by our mother
to the booth outside the grocery store,
evenings whiled away under its moth-yellow glow,
chatting and laughing with her latest beau,
making call after call with the same lucky quarter.
There were always messages -- a religious tract
to make a child ponder the afterlife, always an expletive
or phone number, or the secret code of initials,
a bright red heart rounded with a Sharpie.
But you knew that someone loved someone else,
enough so to write it down for all to see,
or scratched it into metal, sticky and smudged,
those rough, uneven letters, as close to permanent
as anything -- their messages still there,
long after their houses have all been removed,
declaring themselves, always in the present tense,
far above our cool and collective silence.
