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Roger Bonair-Agard Page 2
Fulton Street / Bedford-Stuyvesant
1989
See here – this corner
bodega is where Biggie
dropped freestyle bombs
before anyone knew
he was the Greatest of All
Time, before the police
started smiling at
residents, before this same
bodega in the picture,
started selling soy milk
and organic toilet paper,
before it was a yoga studio
before the blood was
scrubbed with lye and rock
salt off the sidewalk by the
fallen boy’s mother
before we paraded Biggie’s
coffin aloft through
the streets of
Bedford-Stuyvesant the livest one
before beef with Pac, before
white youth got
so goddamned brave enough to
even ride the train
into Brooklyn, before
slumlords fixed the toilets
and cleaned the lobbies and
got rid of the rats
and didn’t come to the
building with thugs
to collect the rent, before
Giuliani, even
before Manhattan got too
expensive and chased
the artists south who
believed they were
the first artists ever to
come here, because
that’s always how white
people Columbus
up till now, before the
bodega let you
come into the store to buy
25 cent loose cigarettes
in the middle of the night
and sold them
to you through a
bullet-proof turnstile
at eye-level from the
street, before anyone
asked me for a credit check
to rent a studio
apartment, before coffee
shops, before
they finally fixed the
C/Shuttle stop at Franklin
and Fulton, before the end
of crack or the Reagan
era, before Amadou Diallo
and Dumbo
and Palladium was still
there and Tyson was champ
and NWA was still together,
and Left-Eye was
still alive and they hadn’t
cleaned the vials
off the field we played on
in Saturday leagues
even though families were
there, and children
were being raised and the
people asked for
good food and were ignored
and were sent
patrol cars rolling their
neighborhoods slow
and no one was so goddamned
proud of themselves
because they planted a
community garden and called
the cops on their neighbors
with noise complaints
and boasted about the great
West Indian food
and complained about how
hard it was to find
tofu, but the people here
are so real, they said,
and so alive, it was
great to live here before
everybody decided
to come.
Ghost
When I played out in the street,
or next door
at the Perezes, dusk came and my
grandmother’s
call went out. It separated my
name into three
syllables, and its siren stayed
in the air
for longer than we imagined it
could, like
the last red in sunset, burning
away slow
in the August, in the cane-fire
air.
I’d drop my marbles, the bat,
the ball
and churn my bare feet through
the dust
across the asphalt and into our
backyard
before that shrill cry died. Me
and my boys
laugh still -
- In that six o’clock
air, that summons
was thick with threat. It went
out
and I
got ghost.
© Copyright, 2013, Roger Bonair-Agard, . |