“On the Ave?”
We laughed at her
genuine Awe.
North avenue in her eyes
was some big thing.
We couldn't understand it.
But the city is a grid,
And I suppose to someone commuting up from 64th,
1 sounds pretty good
for lack of better dreaming.
Even Michelle,
hot Cheetos pinched between press-ons
at her Mickey-Mouse-ass school,
says “Pulaski's ghetto as hell.”
It's not like I haven't seen the streetwalkers,
crack addicts
and bodies under blankets
or heard the fear
in the Uber driver's cracking voice
as she laid on the gas through the red light.
For a long while, the down-and-out
gathered in the rummage and piss
at its boarded entrance,
enticed,
perhaps,
to worship
at the church the white folk left behind
before the neighborhood browned.
Classical revival?
Then why is it dead!
It's an eyesore:
classical orders
beside
graffitied boards,
but at least it keeps
rents low.
Oh?!
So the name makes sense then…
They cleared the bodies
and moved the bus stop
in the same month.
“Gentrification is around the corner”
now reads pristine and repainted,
but its sister mural “aquívivigente”
has been marred with white.
It grows like moss:
the old god
and its pale green.