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.