Holes
I still remember
the park we played in as kids.
Griffiti riddled slide and rusty chained swings.
Broken glass scattered in crab grass.
And the girl who lived in the block of apartments
across the street with her grandmother.
Her smile the whitest thing I’d ever seen.
Lips the color of cherry bubble gum.
She smiled a lot. My mouth would always
go very dry whenever I spoke to her.
Once she asked me
why my friends called me ‘poor’?
I opened my mouth and closed it.
Stuttered.
My friends said they would show her why.
I still remember
I laughed
that begging, breathless kind of laughter.
The sound you make when you realize
people you trusted
are going to betray you, hurt you and
you want to show yourself
much stronger than you are.
It’s all just one big joke
and you can take a joke.
I still remember
they ripped the sneakers from
my feet exposing the holey socks
concealed within.
The flesh of the heel and toes
too white.
The proof that I was poor was in the socks,
they screamed victorious.
I still remember
the sneakers, I’d worked
five weeks of a Saturday job,
sweeping dust on a construction site to buy,
casually tossed into a garbage pail
full of black banana peels,
coke cans, wasps, diapers, used condoms
and all the other shit. Discarded.
They all laughed that triumphant kind of laughter.
They had won something and
what it was they had won,
I still don’t know.
I still remember
looking at all of the pointed fingers and
sharp faces there in that park and
the girl who lived in the block of apartments
across the street with her grandmother.
Her smile the whitest thing I’d ever seen.
Lips the color of cherry bubble gum.
She was pointing too.
She called me pathetic,
a word wrapped in razor-tipped giggles.
I still remember
fishing the sneakers from the garbage.
I couldn’t understand why
my holey socks were funny.
We were all poor,
wearing the same clothes everyday.
Our mothers all working the night-shift and
our fathers construction laborers.
We were all living in the same
poor neighborhood
together.
Megumi
I suppose even fireflies they too turn to ash
but tonight
I’m sitting in this hot bath with you.
The bath bombs you brought
smell like strawberries.
We watch them dissolve slowly in the space between us.
Listening to the radio and the sounds of water like piano keys
as you scrub the filth from my body and my heart.
Watching you lather foam from across your milky
shoulders and breasts, the light running over your moist skin
sunshine through cream fabric hanging from a summer window,
in your eyes — moonlight on glass.
I know this moment is something
I want to capture and
hold glowing in a jar like a firefly.
On That Early Morning Street
Hot piss seeped dark into the grit
making shapes,
hard cases squealing like the children
they were
about who would open
the bloodied, unconscious drunk’s
damp billfold.
No one wanted piss on their hands,
the blood was all right.
The blood on our fists was something
to be measured and compared
as though it were the size of our pricks.
