the oak frames and polyester tarp peel
like the hawkers’ chapped lips.
Where I come from,
a collection of relics litters the street:
single-use syringes
having abandoned their craftsmanship.
A foreign couple flashes their dialect,
and suddenly everyone listens.
There are no neighborhood parks,
as they had been told,
only a routine array of displacement.
A young woman with painted eyes
stands over the rot
of an abandoned children’s museum.
Even the divet in a curbside mattress
remains unaccompanied.
What is more terrifying?
being raised in a city built for crime,
or a city built for no one.
May 15, 2019
May 15, 2019 at 10:36 PM UTC
the oak frames and polyester tarp peel
like the hawkers’ chapped lips.
Where I come from,
a collection of relics litters the street:
single-use syringes
having abandoned their craftsmanship.
A foreign couple flashes their dialect,
and suddenly everyone listens.
There are no neighborhood parks,
as they had been told,
only a routine array of displacement.
A young woman with painted eyes
stands over the rot
of an abandoned children’s museum.
Even the divet in a curbside mattress
remains unaccompanied.
What is more terrifying?
being raised in a city built for crime,
or a city built for no one.
from "Black Bones" collection
