the sky is veiled black.
Who,
still alive and still
living
in Bushwick, sees Vita
or
Vito? Or William Vito? Or Vito William,
newborn?
Out
of
the womb and out
of
the neighborhood. It must be that
some
very old ones
see
them still, somehow.
There
are factory jobs to attract (im)migrants
to
the city. Nothing truly changes. I stand
in
front of the building that my ancestors live in
and
now people live there as people have for a century
and
more people live there before that building is there.
Mineral
and earth mold into each brick of this building.
Hands
(whose?) touch each one. Buy and sell each one.
We
believe.
There
is Woodhull Hospital now
and
that is an interruption. But people
are
always getting sick or asthmatic or injured. People always die
and
may stay. Vito and Vita lose three babies.
My
mother uses the word “perished.”
Then
Vita dies when my grandfather is quite young.
Then
my grandfather’s wife dies when my mom is quite young.
That’s
her mother who dies, the loss of her life.
She
clamps down her teeth, leaks blood.
As
of this (gone) moment, my mother is seventy-three years old and I am
thirty-seven years old.
Her
tongue still shapes like a mitten.
Ellery
Street. Woodhull Hospital.
Bushwick.
Bensonhurst. Commack. Regalbuto. Etna
always
visible, smoking obscenely when I make my way down those hills.
Where the sky can clear, when clear
Lose
language and religion, again.
Lose
memory and medicine
and
gain America worth millions more
than
your grandmother’s ash,
a
white-lined highway bought
by
selling ethnicity’s dirt roads.
Try
via sky via sea
but
can’t refill my mouth
with
lost dialect.
Can’t
be new. Nothing new.
Surely
my ancestors’ antecessors
travel, change
words
that always exist
in
Persia, in Egypt.
This
quarter-inch of privilege. This skin
sunning
on a rooftop near Avola on the southern coast of Sicily
drinking
juice of wide green lemons picked in the yard,
salting
the water the salt needed in that heat.
Gazing
at something new, this rocky busted road.
Not
new. The furniture I lay on is Ikea. The sea I swim in:
Mediterranean or Ionian. There’s no clear border.
