Another Brooklyn

I want your promised future filling up the empty space ahead of me.

Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures

know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

Once, my brother and I had sat at a window, watching the world. Now we were deeply inside that world, working hard to find our way through it.

as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

It wasn’t yet my stop.
But I got off anyway.

She had aged beautifully in the twenty years since I’d last seen her.

But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat.

Where would we be now if we had known there was a melody to our madness?