Chonkem

to crook ones neck
like a violin player
bent at the knees
like a pianist standing up

to dress oneself in opera houses
allow the frequencies, the impossible cottons,
to sculpt oneself in the reflection
of their most brilliant and unusual dreams

i should like so much
to wear my hat
like a bird's shadow

for every question posed
which dwarfs the minds of geniuses
, let me keep conference
with my own chest
and pose from there
my answer, certain

Top 12 store names on Myrtle Ave

From north to south:

PRETTY GIRL
BOB'S TROPICAL PET CENTER
PLANET FASHIONS GEAR
BJ NICHOL'S FURNITURE EMPIRE
1/2 PRICE KIDS
LINDA'S DANCESTATION
TOOLS PLUS PLUS
FRAGRANCE PLAZA INC
KAYCI'S MAGIC CASTLE
YOUNG AND Q FASHION
DOUBLE CHINESE RESTAURANT
DRAMA SINGING DANCE KARATE

Halloween encounter

She was living in Chicago at the time.

She and her boyfriend were at the laundromat folding laundry
when a mother and son walked in.

The mother had whiskers drawn on her face in marker
The son had a circle drawn around his face in marker.

These were their costumes.

The mother walked up to the laundromat attendant
held out her purple plastic bag
and said,
"tree-tree-tree-tree-tree!"

Autobiography


in the hot, still august of 2005 i moved to new york from san francisco into an apartment kitty-corner from a bodega called cheveres. in san francisco we called them corner stores or liquor stores but here they are bodegas and i liked that a lot. they played merengue music all the time at cheveres and they sold 24 ounce coors tallboys for a dollar even. the neighborhood was mostly lower-middle class dominicans, blacks, and hispanics. when my roommates and i left the house we caused a small scene. several 10-13 year old kids hung out and taunted us, "hey hipsters!" we laughed about it but secretly i think we were all horrified by the attention.

i spent christmas eve, 2005 in brooklyn. some friends and i went to a bar and then i returned to my apartment. it was about 11pm as i approached my front stoop. there was a small party happening in a building opposite mine and someone yelled, "get out of my neighborhood, weirdo!" i probably looked strange wearing my multi-colored beanie and long black coat. the beanie was a gift and i got the coat from the local thrift store, (which is now located down the street from its old location.)

across from cheveres was another store called super meat market. there were nice people who worked there, a kid named lionel and an older guy who was also friendly and unassuming. that was in 2005. since then super meat market has closed down. the kids who taunted us have mostly grown up and moved to bed-stuy. we see a couple of them at the annual block parties, overgrown and shuffling among their mothers and younger siblings. the chinese food place has changed its name from new happy to chen yuen. there used to be a bearded homeless man who sat on the sidewalks all day long, sometimes he had groceries with him, in winter he buried himself in huge blankets... he disappeared around 2008. cheveres is now called jaileen and the tallboys are $1.50.

the same clerk works at jaileen who always worked at cheveres. in the first couple years i asked his name a few times but it always came out incomprehensible and i finally stopped asking. he and i are friends of six years with no idea what each other's name is.

one afternoon, maybe 2009, he informed me that he likes to go down to myrtle on the weekends and get an iced coffee from dunkin donuts and walk up and down the promenade. i do pretty much the same thing. myrtle is about eight blocks away from that old apartment but it took a little over a year of living there before i got comfortable going down there. you can imagine how hard this was when you consider how hard it was to leave the house at all. in those very early days my only destinations was cheveres, or else the subway which took me into another world altogether.

Brillante Car Wash

i see the bristling mustaches
of Eastern European philosophers
in the revolving brushes
on the underbelly
of street sweeping machines
cracker crumbing the
wet gray angles of Gates Avenue

i see the Mesopotamian wheel-barrows
filled to the brim with watermelons
all tumbling and bumbling
in the belly of cement trucks
passed incredible below my window

cars woosh by and
you can almost hear their headlights
reflecting against the road

Steven


He asked me what I thought of John Gotti. I didn't think about John Gotti so I asked if we could rephrase the question as: what do you think about the mafia mentality? and he said that worked just fine but I didn't have thoughts about that either. "I just don't know." I was only there to watch the basketball game.


So he told me a story, I think it took place in the 70's. He and some some friends went to Howards Beach for a BBQ. they rode their bikes into John Gotti's block party so John Gotti walked up to them with a body guard and asked them why they were there and did Steven know who he was? Steven did not so John Gotti said, 'I'm John Gotti.' Steven's hot headed friend Hector behaved like a saint and Jon Gotti liked how respectful everybody was so he got them plates of food to eat. When they finished, John Gotti suggested they get the fuck off his block and they did.


The telling of that story must have reminded Steven of the story he told next: back in middle school he'd been good friends with a girl named Antionette - just friends - he ate dinner at her house sometimes. At some point her crazy brother Timmy got out of jail (for killing people) and so he'd be at the table too. One day some girls beat up Antionette at school. Timmy said he would handle it. The parents said, 'No Timmy! Let us handle it!' but Timmy went to the middle school the next day (he was about 25 years old) and he brought a bullhorn. He said, 'I wanna know who beat up my sister!' several times until a teacher came out. This was in Bay Terrace, by the way, Steven tells me. Timmy said, 'are you the principal of this school?' she said no, so he said 'get her out here right now or I'm gonna blow this whole school to kingdom come!' so she got the principal but then someone called the police! So the principal was out there with Timmy and then a million cop cars arrived. They tried to re-arrest Timmy but he said 'if anybody shoots, I'll kill the principal!' so... just like that... all the cop cars drove away. "They all drove away?"


"Yup." Steve laughed and sipped his beer. "So he got away?" "MOST of the cop cars drove away, but some stayed." So what happened? "Timmy used the principal as a hostage until he got into his car and drove away." "Did they ever get him?" "I'm sure they probably did."


Later Steven told me about the time he met Stevie Wonder. It was at a music festival. Stevie came out to talk to the fans. It was great! and then someone tapped Steven on his shoulder while he was mid conversation with Stevie. She said 'do you know who i am?' and Steven was so amazed, he said 'Yes! you are Diana Ross!' and that was how he met Diana Ross, right before he met Gladys Knight.


Clara

buildings wilt and bloom like all things planted in the earth
but while a flower always sprouts on the top of a plant, so it is the opposite with buildings
whose shop awnings emerge colorful, age, and are replaced uniformly from the bottom.

if you really want to see how old a building is you have to look up.

sometimes when she has nothing else to do, clara takes mason jars,
sprays the insides with the dim flashes of a weeknight talk show,
and fills them with bouquets of buildings.

she leaves them on the fire escapes of her neighbors.
if you look up at the right time, you can see her gently tugging them ou
 from the sky and assigning them unpronounceable names.

she was born in 1892 when her name was the 9th most popular woman's name in brooklyn.

The benches outside Passport Photo

a mother pokes her four year old son in the ribs
"don't touch me!"
a mother pokes her four year old son in the ribs
"don't touch me!"
a mother pokes her four year old son in the ribs
"what the hell did i do to you!?"
the mother smirks, turning to her husband
the four year old kisses her
"don't kiss me!"

Orange pelican

things that cost a quarter are basically free. we got these kinds of things on myrtle. firetrucks, ponies with stars painted on their sides, giraffes in top hats, squirrels in sunglasses... they look like porcelain but are actually made of a much more durable space-age material. the children ride them and then they go to the store and buy ice cube trays with their mothers.

a lone, bug-eyed cow on the sidewalk, moving gently in a small, mechanical motion, playing music from atlantis. a just-barely-not-mickey-mouse mouse outside the drapes and blankets store. sometimes the kids are filmed as they ride them, up and down, up and down, smiling patiently into their father's telephone. i know that small children consider these rides a perk of strolling along myrtle. as an adult i know these rides are sacred things. they remind me of an irrelevant portion of my childhood that never took place. i walk past these things, i am doing something else.

i walked past an orange pelican ride and nobody was on it. the music was playing and the pelican was moving slowly up and down in the way it's paid to move, but there was nobody around except for me. i'm almost thirty years old and i am not the rider this orange pelican is looking for. a guilty feeling overcomes me like ignoring a beggar in your path. there were invisible children at the coffee shop that afternoon.