Everybody loves babies.
A woman wails, a baby cries. Something begun. Something ended.
Both competing with other lies. Unattended.
Un ghetto. En Miami. Halo the day.
Radios.
A deep-throated voice stridently spits and sputters from an upstairs window;
Trumpet-infested jazz classically clutters an apartment one floor below.
Grease is sizzling in a pan. Bacon. I can tell
From the smell.
A fellow once a man, clothed in skin that once was tan,
in a tee that was once a rag,
Takes a sip, then a gulp from something tall inside a paper bag.
A car grovels, chucks up a hack and starts.
A dog barks.
There’s an argument somewhere. The tone shrill, a tad rough. A teen
Stomps into a doorway and flounces out, acting tough, mean
Cuffing off relations yet again with her father
Or mother.
Somewhere, somehow, someway, and nobody seems to know why, it begins.
Between the turquoise building with flaking paint
And the one we thought was brick but ain’t
(That was all just a façade, you see, wiped out in the last hurricane)
Is this cottage, puckering up like a boil. Been there for years. Frame.
Little old lady used to live there, but she died.
Took over by her nephew, the one what was fried
Half the time on wine, the other half on squeeze.
Lastly at Raiford. Seems he was the reason she died. Sleaze,
Some said. Ricans, some said, but no one knew. The bank got it somehow.
They always do, if you wait long enough. Two sometime families
sometimes live there now.