1.
How much we are like buildings,
and the alleys are the dark, cool gaps between us.
The streets and avenues are the ways we meet
and leave each other.
And what about the gutters?
The bricks, just like skin,
shed shadows and hug back memories,
while I hold a warm battle in my mouth
like the endless muffled arguments
leaking from the penthouse.
2.
And when we’re demolished or dead,
what remains?
Is there a pocket of my family history
floating over second street,
or my grandfather’s ghost still shuffling
with his mail bag on the boulevard?
I’m sure I’ve passed through him.
Do these columns of life retain what they’ve been?
A new family moves in to the new building,
seven stories up, just there, in the same air
where my mother decided to keep me.
3.
My body sprouts up and radiates.
A delicate architecture that travels and sleeps
and was given a name, an address.
But what did I displace?
Was it a tree and my heart is a knot?
Was there an ocean here?
I might still feel the current in my blood,
or the saltiness.
I might speak and you’ll hear the static of leaves
or the wind you flew a kite through once.
