especially when there was snow on the road

or rain that glistened from the no-longer-in-use 

trolley tracks running right down the middle 

of Broad Street. How he dreaded in anticipation

the moment when the wheels of his jerrybuilt,

wartime bike with its woven wartime wooden

basket brimming with cartons of eggs, would

slip and slide. But the best customer, Frank’s 

wife, living on the third floor, high above the

Woodbine Cafe, never once complained that

there were one or two cracked shells in the lot

(though she winced a lot) or that anyone would

have preferred that their eggs had been candled

(or, at the least, the egg-man had scrubbed them).

George Monteiro

George Monteiro is a lifelong student and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contributing to the scholarship on numerous writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan. His latest book is Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012).