piss-rank in the sink, who left Angel’s mother a baby with HIV,
now lurks outside of Saint Bartholomew’s funeral home, lupine,
ghost-eyed under lamplight. A crowd of home-
boys and homegirls from Hart flock close to see
Angel lose it — fists, blood, a midnight brawl.
The air is knife-thick. She can hardly catch her breath.
Angel, stock-still, walks towards him slow.
Stops. His lips twist.
He lets loose a cry. Hugs Flaco tight.
They sob into each other’s thick wool coats.
Rain
He’s standing in the rain, she’s crying by her door.
Early December. Japanese maple leaves stain the
wet gravel red. A sharp pain
cleaves her rib cage like a switchblade. The cheap floor
of her apartment is soaked. God, no more
mornings listening to the express trains
hurtle by, watching amber light wane
in seawaves on his back. A cheap whore
in a Mets T-shirt, she imagines herself through
his eyes. But what does she know?
He’s soaked to bone; his collarbones store
pools of rain. He tries to sear a true
memory of her into him — Indigo. Broken. Aglow.
He’s standing in the rain. She’s crying by her door.
Angel’s Rehab Suitcase
Guess jeans,
two Polo sweaters,
Hannah’s folded letter,
Bic shaving cream,
five pairs of white socks,
Fruit of the Loom long johns,
black velour tracksuit by Sean John,
beeswax for his new dreadlocks,
five plain white tees,
two do-rags, one Goofy tie,
E-Z rolling paper for trees,
four cotton boxers (one fly
silk pair), one necklace of cowrie
shells, one scrap of blue sky.
Rehab
A scrape of metal chair on tile.
Sign-in. The portly counselor,
Mr. Wilkins, who prods your old
lover to sit up straight for your visit while
scribbling notes on a pad —
he doesn’t know anything. Anything.
When he leaves the drab office, Angel clasps your
fingers in his dry hands. You hate rehab.
Its cigarette death-air. His stubble. Torn T-shirt.
Hair thinning to peaks on his forehead.
His eyes, shadows of his young eyes.
How they search you, hurt.
You gaze up at his bare temples instead,
afraid to stare back with less. Or with a lie.
Guilt
Try as she might, she can’t envision
a future with him beyond Bushwick —
tethered with children, yoked by familia,
she cannot wait the eternity of Angel’s sentence
while she’s still in the full bloom of womanhood.
Guilt chews her insides, but she can
no longer hide from herself the truth
of their unraveling, how her love for him has
become stained by all the grit & grime, dimmed
by their troubled, turbulent time together.
She stays awake, sleepless all night,
trying to decide her future ~
to let go ~ go for her own freedom,
or cling on to his sinking boat.
Countryless
Ay, they were two children lost
under the merciless glare of city lights.
A Corean and Boricua, diaspora kids,
brave enough to ride
underground trains like metallic waves,
just to catch da electric surge of a hug
from a budding red ~ gold love…
Throbbing. Hot. Burning.
When she met him, she felt the loneliness
in him call out to the loneliness in her.
If her pain folded up
like a tight virgin rose, his pain
pulled her in like a gaping black hole.
Quiet, proud boy. His honey~brown eyes.
She sees them as two kids hand-holding over a glittering street,
lampposts arching overhead like acacia trees,
young ones in search of a thornless bed to sleep.
Seeds
Towards the end, her wishes for Angel grow
small and hard as a handful of dry sunflower seeds:
she prays he’ll get his GED…
his baby brother, Rafi, will grow
tall as a beanstalk…all
AZT cocktails sure as magic potions. She prays
he’ll find a girl eager to read him medicine labels,
job applications, maybe even poems. He’ll fall
in love with this stranger, she’ll birth him a healthy son
for all the ones Hannah could not, would not, carry.
A girl who doesn’t hiss, scream, throw things,
burn his self-esteem to ash. Someone
who coddles him, a good girl he could marry.
But she hopes she’ll always be the Queens girl of his dreams.
Past
You and I. We remember different stories.
The past is a burning book.
I’m unlearning the fairy tale — Angel — letter by letter by letter.
A shiny boy, cheap as a coin. If I rub the gleam off, are you copper or gold?
Does it matter, if I hold you in my heart-pocket
as a girl~child holds an amulet? What are we to each other?
Magic that conjures joy, halts the loneliness.
A lucky penny pulled shining from an ear.
And, wait, something heavier comes out. Night-grief.
Ancestral grief. Being called out our names, the spic-gook grief.
Being robbed of our sovereignty, colonized grief.
Oceans from our motherlands, diaspora grief.
Being two separate islands grief.
Still. We glow gold. Two flames. Bright and brief.
Until morning breaks our spell, Angel,
I dream of you holding me in this forgiving light.
Gold Hoops
One day she will be brave enough
to venture away from her huge gold hoops & bodysuits,
from parroting her mean friends’ laughter, or sitting on the stoop
for hours, trying to look half-fly/half-tough,
sucking on a sour apple Blow Pop,
listening to the boom boxes spit out hip-hop.
One day she will
look at her rough, scarred face
without her MAC eyeliner and stop
hating those young, haunted eyes.
I hope a slant of gold light will hit her cheek
just right, and it may come as a surprise
to her how fine she really is. Fabulous. Sleek.
Soulful — full of her own juju and mystique…
a rose fury! Gold lightning when she hits the street.
Girlfish
She’s gone. Like a woman entering a pool,
her body erased with each step.
What’s left? A gold shimmer.
Now where will a lost boy fish for angels?
Not in stained-glass or god-songs.
Yes, he is alone in his city,
sidewalks parched as desert.
Oasis: glimmer of girls by Kim’s Nails.
Mirage: every girl, an empty glass.
The closer he gets, the more thirsty.
His vision wavers. He scans the river-street,
searching for a girl in the shape of a salmon,
one who can break his
surface with a wild hallelujah of water.
Epic
(What if Angel was a true prince, not a mere
street king? And Hannah, a princess instead
of the daughter of poor Korean immigrants
who painted nails on Queens Blvd? Would we
altar their love higher, deem it
