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One July Ago, There Was a Cafe
by Keith Gaboury

at Broadway and Grand
yet its name just leapt 
off my tongue
like my great-uncle Gary
who leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge
to his Pacific Ocean coffin.
They never found his body
like I can’t find the name
of that Grand Ave. café.
On a grand ultraviolet day,
its walls got smashed 
by a wrecking ball.
Before they flipped over 
their ‘CLOSED’ sign
for the terminus time, I stood 
in a café line 
that pays a property tax
to occupy my memory
where I picked up offshoots 
of a conversation
like how Gary 
picked me up in his gray pickup truck 
at the Amtrak station on 2nd and Alice.
He smiled with such unshackled joy
as he drove through a rainstorm.
In the café line, I remember 
these big fat raindrops 
muscled themselves down to the ground
as one friend said to the other:
Did you hear they just put a net
around the Golden Gate Bridge
to catch anyone trying to commit suicide?
I itched to jumpstart a suicide
from the café line
when an employee, a savior
with coffee-black hair,
ushered me forward
with a midday whistle. 
Yesterday I saw this employee 
unemployed and unhoused 
next to the Starbucks on Clay.
After I dropped them a silver dollar,
I ambled home under a silver moon
round like a noose.

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Hear Keith Gaboury recite the poem on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast: