Dave Bonta's short poem builds a strange, shimmering city and then refuses to explain it. Everything in it is slightly off. A glass city has no glass windows, which is a small puzzle right away: if the city is glass, what would a window even be? The king is "kin to his own nothing," so his power seems hollow, a ruler related only to emptiness. The queen, oddly, is "a whole table," as if she has turned into a piece of furniture, or perhaps a setting where things are laid out and shared.
The last lines deliver no neat answer. The "difference between gold and evening" feels like a shift in light, a glittering surface giving way to dusk. The speaker sounds more fascinated than angry or sad. The mood is dreamlike and quietly melancholy, a little like glancing at a glowing skyline and sensing something unreal behind it. The title may nudge us to think of a famous street, but the poem leaves its meaning for you to fill in.