brooklyn

I.
brooklyn,
they say you’re gritty,
but i prefer textured.
new york is an overbearing father
with a long line of lonely babys mamas.
brooklyn, you whisper the names of your mothers slowly,
your history, a mantra.
you repeat their names:  poverty, ennui, desperation, colonialism, persecution, hope.
brooklyn,
you are the illegitimate child of 1,000 dutifully fruitful fucks.
looked over by lady liberty,
with neighbors like the east river,
long island,
and that bitch queens–
you are trapped in tightly packed tenement walls,
seeping through brick
and concrete,
you refuse to be contained.
brooklyn, your arms display bad habits.
the track marks of flatbush, atlantic, 4th ave,
pockmarked from discarded gum
and the sunday morning vomit of nights and years past.
brooklyn, we love you because
of these things,
not in spite of them.

II.
brooklyn,
we are your two and a half million bastard children.
living reminders of your oft-murdered soul.
we lay our heads on your
sad, heaving, breasts,
hemorrhaging refugees from foreign lands
with every tear.
we came from puerto rico, ohio, shanghai,
to see what chances crumbling walls may offer.
brooklyn,
we are starving for nourishment.
will you reject those who adopted you?
if your back hasn’t broken yet,
it must be bent
into the shape of the BQE.
brooklyn,
we want to be the ones you call on
your cigarette break,
not the cause of it.
we are the dopamine flying from firing neural synapses
when the edges of your mouth turn up.
we want nothing more than to make you proud.

III.
brooklyn,
you have taught me
to look for my self
in the spaces between subway cars
and drinking wine with obstreperous women
in vegan restaurants.
you have made a home for me
outside the eye of my storm.
brooklyn,
you have raised me
to believe that
bodies are mutable,
in the ways that enemies become comrades.
when i am hurt
your lips touch my forehead.
no one loves me like you.
brooklyn,
there will come a day
when i have to fly away from your nest,
but i will carry the lessons embedded in your smile
under my wing.
brooklyn,
when we hug
i will lean in close to put the truth carefully in your ear:
that you have pulled me
from the rubble of  a fire-scarred past,
given me the task of
going back in to rescue others.
brooklyn,
you will give birth to my future.