In Blocks of Light, She Calls Back

Abstract

Cave-like, a lash-fringed darkness they would handle it, she and her little sister, this city life. Lit fire-flowers in the loamy sky every July 4, visited the inner harbor, cookouts in backyard squares, watched the matte black animate, sentient, lip-gloss sticky stars, how the easy smoke erased the hot stench of singed skin, the corner men’s amino-sweet roaring, daubed with piss and weed and diluted cologne, a vial or two clinking amid the cop’s dry barking, the nervous leg-jiggles, side-eye, thistle-brush beards cut like wet onion tops, glinting acrid and beige as the fingernails of the supine body slept on the bench’s cool slats reading Greatest City in America. Someone was sighing thickly, saying the dead man’s teeth looked like lemon salt that just missed the rim and hit the mouth with a steel punch or the musical velocity of cherry blossom petals scattering in violent spring rain.