Page 36

By Jack Joseph Smith

Poverty Program Intrusion It was on Pittsburgh's lower Fifth Avenue where I was preaching the word after work Which at that time was William Saroyan No; it wasn't Fifth Avenue It was Forbes Street which is one street up South The tavern where I'd gone was down from the tunnel that leads toward the Southside That's how I know now through that huge round stone It was a bad bar with too much mirror and no white light Piss over glassy fine dirt Like the coal one can breathe Finished to a flush from footwork beneath a strung out brick alley lady Like thin resin over a floor of ants For high-heeled, low-soled lonely danced jukebox shoes To be devil enticed down through the faded up gleam of a face peering from the below of 1930 squared black tile She was in nasty garment shape of torn pale green shades With a gray spider shawl tied to her loose pinned bun of hair Drunk with loss beneath forgiveness of a kind the heavens would pile up on a doomsday While I was young and foolish with fancy notions from my own emotional problem with perception (no mirror now) We had started at one of the back bench hard booth brown black on black tables (the thick of the fiftiesh type plastic excapes me) But from there along the wall I now remember us seated at the bar on... round old cracked red leather able to spin stool high big tops "In the time of your life," I read, "if in that time of your life you must kill, then kill, and don't feel bad about it."

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A remembered Pittsburgh bar scene turns literary ambition into something grimy, theatrical, and helpless beside another person's visible ruin.

The speaker carefully corrects the street name and maps the tunnel, mirrors, dirt, tile, jukebox shoes, and torn clothing, as if exact memory might justify what happened there. Reading William Saroyan in that room feels half earnest and half absurd, especially against the woman's drunkenness and the bar's stale, mirrored ugliness. The quoted line about killing lands like a dangerous collision between art, youth, and misery.

Claude

'Poverty Program Intrusion' recalls a bad Pittsburgh bar near Forbes Street where the young speaker was 'preaching the word after work', which 'at that time was William Saroyan', beside a 'strung out brick alley lady' in 'torn pale green shades / With a gray spider shawl'. It ends with him reading Saroyan aloud: 'if in that time of your life / you must kill, then kill, / and don't feel bad about it.'

The speaker keeps correcting his own map, from Fifth Avenue to Forbes Street, as if exact geography could make the memory trustworthy, and the room is built from hard detail: too much mirror, '1930 squared black tile', jukebox shoes. He is candid about being 'young and foolish with fancy notions', so the scene is both homage to Saroyan and self-indictment. The quoted lines about killing land with unsettling force in a place already full of loss, and the woman is given enough physical particularity to keep her from becoming a mere prop.