“Epidemic”
Notes from a newspaper archive
Existing.
They’re here, but why?
Teenagers with their bottles of window cleaner.
I have so many questions leafing
through old yellowed clips and standing
shoulder to shoulder in a warm room.
It feels like history, but the pieces are missing—
the questions are there, but the answers are
mixing with soapy water, tossed out at the end of the day.
The nightly news says one thing:
patrols try to deter aggressive panhandling,
