1.
A day when lawn tractors roll out from sheds
and air conditioners, dormant for months, turn on,
the same evening before the first night of Passover
when thunder shakes oak trees for early acorns.
In another storm
by the fire house near Hunts Point Avenue,
rain ambushed my face in a circle of bullets,
wondered who I’d be if I’d never been born
leaped over concentric rings of darkness
until I could go no further, clutching
a jelly jar filled with grasshoppers,
punched nails for air holes through the tin lid.
After the street lights came on,
I held the honey of their death.
San Mateo, Golden Gate, Richmond, Dumbarton,
intoned the names of bridges,
crickets and frogs falling over each other
in the spring rain.
2.
A cellphone vibrates along the length of a boy’s zipper,
a girl squeezes a rolled-up yoga mat between her thighs,
customers sit at a café, laptops on a tattooed street.
A peddler of iridescent butterfly wings,
sunset caught between power lines,
ginger jar molded by wet hands, the glint of a talisman
one to protect against snake bite,
another, for fertility.
3.
Now I pass through a turnstile.
Scarved. No one looks.
Cheekbones and chin lines. Gone.
Curves and hipbones soft as brioche,
who on this Monday,
the third day of the first week in June
during a year of great bickering
between political parties,
file for social security benefits,
collect my sacrifice
become a recipient
play my number for everything its worth.
Interesting Lenore – waiting for the rest. By the way “I felt the rain on my face”.
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