Before he took up with her
he had been smelling like
tea leaves and jazz riffs —
something mixed up, lost and
familiar that clung to the august air
long after he split from that corner
with the five and dime where
the mother is always breast-feeding
in the thick shade of the COLD BEER awning.
He must’ve tired of how
city streets have a way of making
you forget where you came from.
you walk on a heartbeat street —
beaten-up, worn-down, torn-up,
whose potholes swell with every breath
and exhale of the street-corner saxophone
and it takes you long minutes to recall
you were birthed in that old house with the
shades drawn like sleepy eyelids over dim windows
and not right here in the street.
Now you are living in a city of the quick, and
the clucking you hear is not chickens back home,
but women nesting in the streetlights, and you
chase a shadow around a corner
only to find it is a real girl with hips and flesh,
ripe like the peaches your daddy handed you in the backyard,
so you find yourself trying to guess where her bruises lie
and how you could trace your finger over each softest circle
until your tracings are her birthmarks
she is loving to show everyone.
