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What drove a man all the way from Puerto Rico
to New York slum promise: a home
enough bread and meat to still
the gnawing inside only
doesn’t feed the soul’s belly
vicarious lusts of a public
who wanted blood,
what it cost him,
film about this Puerto Rican poet
who bled on paper:
“I do bad things so I can write about them”
with me as I left the cinema, walked down
blocks in metal lock-up, grafitti ravings
bouncing off foreclosed immigrant dreams,
men like my father who
opened one store after another
to salvage minimum wage lives
behind a cash register,
lose what they
never imagined having....
No place for a woman alone
where streets mattressed homeless bodies
forever in imagination
and a knife in my back might be only
as far away as someone’s hunger,
who’d kill for a greasy meal
easily as a farmer slaughters
a pig a chicken to survive;
but gentrification danger is new safety
where tenament rents
skyscrape believe in trendy poverty;
walked past where the sidewalk abruptly curved
thru a gate... once vacant lot
over farm land owned by
New Amsterdam’s governor,
meanders a grove of birch trees
herbs, berries... piece of
the original Bouwerie
grabbed out of stinking garbage centuries later
by green guerilla fighters for $1.00 a month....
wildflower dreams of those who
risked their forgotten lives
to leave something
...hundreds of perennials of varieties
flowering right here now,
sprung out of this very soil
©2002, Linda Lerner
Linda Lerner has published six collections of poetry, been very favorably reviewed by Robert Peters, and was nominated for a Pushcart prize for her fifth book, No Earthly Sense Gets It Right (Lummox Press, 2001). Pudding Press is publishing a chapbook of her poems in their Greatest Hits series. She’s been published in The New York Quarterly, Chelsea, Home Planet News and Chiron, among others. If you liked “The Bowery,” read more of her work online:
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