- The Greenest Block, and: Two Birds, and: In the Small Hours
Immigrants with overstayed visas, Norway maples make a second home in Brooklyn.They do the dirty work: hold placards in the sun, convert concrete into loam in Brooklyn.
Subwoofers whip by in a tricked-out trunk; a bike tire-taps on the curb.The air thickens, squeezes into booty shorts. Summer glints like chrome in Brooklyn.
Forget signals, he said, jaywalking is a rite of passage. And ditch that digital camera.Snapshots betray tourists in Castries, in Rome, in Brooklyn.
The papier-mâché loa in raffia hat and jute sack, pipe in his mouth, red kerchief tuckedin back pocket, has got to be Couzen Zaka disguised as a garden gnome in Brooklyn.
She tills the landing in front of her brownstone, the Hasidic widow who never greets hello.She leaves it to the purple, ruffled-edged petunias to hail “Shalom” in Brooklyn.
No marigolds in tree beds. Graffiti climbs like clematis on storefront gates.They spread like a bridge with sassy voices, these dark-lit streets I roam in Brooklyn. [End Page 141]
Two Birds
caughtin a nylon noose
tethered to a playingfield fence
I reachedbut they flapped
landing featherson my tongue
two, one tiedto the other
to release the snarenot just a little
force would doI did not want
to think of us thenhow bounded we were
by our own flighthow far we soared
that seasononly to be
yankedback [End Page 142]
In the Small Hours
The radiator coming on again.On a floating shelf above the clanging
there’s a picture of my brother,four cousins and myself,
three huddled on the floor,three squeezing shoulders on a sofa,
each staring across an inkblottwenty years away.
Discolored, scotch-tapedat the edges, I can just make out
a left-eye squint, a hint of mauvein a scoop neck shirt,
a pair of barrettesclipped to a pair of plaits,
a snaggletooth grin gone offon its own anomalous search.
Clogged pipes blockthe rising steam. Walls clank,
vapor knocks against steel.In the small hours
the radiator rattles,labors hard for a minor heat. [End Page 143]
Sassy Ross holds an mfa in poetry from New York University. Her work has appeared in Poetry International, the Caribbean Review of Books, Calabash, Caribbean Beat, as well as in the anthology, Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean.