The Brooklyn Rail

2 a.m. on the vacant verging
dark of another bombastic 4th
the bill is slipped into a mailbox
on the corner of Beverley
and Coney and the Halal spot
just closed. You nod your bhai
goodnight as he closes the door
and with it the possibility
of a platter drenched in white
sauce and sumac. An American
Spirit midway between bruised
knuckle and breathlessness
nursed over nine hours of palaver
and promise, past due notices,
and the judge’s ruling against
your argument, forces the turn
on Lewis and you fold
back into the breast of this
neighborhood, this place
you grew up crying inside of.
One block and a world away
from the industrial refuse
and chop shops of the avenue
are trees that still hold
the crepuscular warmth
of fireflies like embers
hungover from late June.
The way they stud the stillness
you feel almost all the way
grateful for. All the way down
to the filter and swathed
in the sudden quiet, contested
by strings of families and ghosts
coming and gone from this zone,
imagined and reimagined
as another blank canvas, another
quaint name for the domestic
ideal, a too-small child holding,
as it’s held, a pair of shears
for deboning all that smoke.