#8

BONGOS:


You ready for coffee, honey? 4 packs sugar, one afternoon. Gotta start somewhere. Which piece. German, Greek, Black, Polish, Irish, Dominican, Italian, Seneca, Poor, Riddled With Lead, Childless, Poetic, Cynical, What. Natives know it’s not the blizzard that gets ya, it’s the salt, asbestos. Breath of marinara. Factory box buildings. Behold, charade of holding our own(s). Fear in each knee, toetip. Don’t trust ‘em.

Dream of post-industrial meltdown, pairs of men in white shirts bobbing through old-wound empty lots, lonely West Side satellites. We live in the City of Good Neighbors. Beautiful day, say some. Hollywood, others. Hollywooood, the jersey gripped low to the groin. Disabled vets flick a butt to the curb and rub together tarred fingertips; Mmmmm baby. You look good today, baby! Very nice, very nice. Does a man feel an obligation to speak to a woman on the sidewalk. Does he learn this from the movies, his grandfather in the factory, the priest eyeing alter boys, in the Fruit Belt seeing his strong mama belt-smacked under the breasts in a ghost-ridden house. Does he feel it each time in his loins. This is not a multiple choice test.

Lift of detail in lung, shattering cornea. The city heaves its chest and out we dive. What could have been, a phantom limb. Tag ‘em high - Hert. Atak. Uphill all the way back? No ice cream? Closed at 5? Robbed at knife point?

My mother taught me to eat everything, in relative silence - pleasure in the quotidiana. Grease stained, no matter. Smell of bread, half-light under steel beams. Water on the street. Picking through garbage behind the hospital where you were born. Under the railroad bridge, over Niagara. Hope where.

BRASS: