Baltimore Sketches

​Baltimore Sketches:

Attica

she made a bed of cruelty wrapped in a house dress with big red ugly flowers --pillows torn and resistant, a scream stitched into a brown duvet with down from better times in her grandmother’s house; cruelty was the hurt that she loved to touch that ached in hungry hours and scabbed over after a fresh kill that took her by surprise…again; she even made cruelty her friend met it at the door and said wipe your feet and don’t leave that umbrella there come and have yourself a seat, the TVs broke;

there were the ones who took what she had that she didn’t know was hers to keep; the casual liars and diamond studded thieves who watched her walk away with a sway that said it knew too much about sashaying down sidewalks with the cars trailing behind and men counting their money; that sway with the world in her pocket when days were long and the con short and she was a number on someone’s trigger and a notch on anybody’s belt Amanda

She had a smile so open you could walk in and take things. Youth was swept up into a ponytail knot on her head. Hazard orange tee shirt with Daffy Duck quacking on the front and shorts, aquatic blue with the white stripe, she wore brown tired moccasins with worn-out strings copies of the ones they wore at the golf course and on

yachts named for skinny women who did pilates she didn’t jog but walked to the bus and wore white Target socks cut at the ankles. Her eyes were blue pools like oceans on the days when the undertow could rub sand in your face There was a wink in her smile that said she would go with you if you asked; maybe a hot dog could get you a summer kiss she would wear brown mustard on her nose and laugh at your jokes if you asked her she only ran to catch the bus to Lexington Market for a fried chicken sandwich from Mexican workers shaped like telephone books, thick with another tongue amidst a sea of black faces searching for the jobs they couldn’t get she didn’t know where she was going but she thought her smile could take her there did not know that her soul was the price of admission when she lotioned endless legs with on-purpose schemes to get her car out of the shop she thought Pilates was a dessert and she would have taken up jogging if someone had told her that she was in a race

Baltimore Sketches: Mama Joe

when she was quick and slender the boys lined up and life was young and hungry pushing up against her like the hope of a baby against a mother’s breast when there were barrettes and fireflies, promises counted for something and did not make her turn away; made her see forever in skies that took you in; stars had names and she knew them many a day her laughter flew up the street and collapsed in Sadie’s yard, where the sprinkler cooled fastdancing barefoot children squealing with arms stretched out at odd angles; breathless and Jason and Luisa came out on the porch; the trees shook the sunlight loose cool shadows fell like peppermints across their lawn Sammy made her act too grown she got a whipping and didn’t cry; hunger could be filled with a popsicle and a kiss days were bright pennies to collect like they could make you rich; until they made you old

Baltimore Sketches: Winston when he walked his pants whispered like the new money shuffling through a Vegas currency machine; with modified black man swagger molten dark, he made Foster Grant shades seem hip; his pants creased and broke on mahogany-buffed Cole Haan oxfords; his head was shaved close to erase the thinning that accompanied success at thirty-four his body looked like it had been poured from passion, clothes hung loose away from the hardness; there were no body shirts, just women who touched themselves when he spoke and tried to remember if they had made their bed; he knew how to make white people feel good about their intolerance; bought them drinks and plotted his way up stayed away from the white girls and counted the golden-toned, ripe young honeys like beads on a rosary, touching one plump smoothness on his way to the next; he left each one in the darkness reaching across the rumpled sheets to feel the warmth of his disappearance, and wonder if he had ever really been there

Baltimore Sketches: Camila

Raven hair frames a pie face

with eyebrows thick with worry

and apprehension;

her nose has flat lines with

lips smoothed over white corn teeth

hidden in her scowl

hey, chica, they call her,

assuming burritos and

tortillas de maiz have plumped her;

she wears black tee-shirt, cheap stiff sandals

and flare skirt with colored instruments

painting themselves over the cloth:

a saxophone, flute, violin, that say

“hey, chica, is at least trying”

actually, her blue jeans were

dirty in the wash that she could not do

today…maybe tomorrow;

tomorrow she will rise from the

pocket of night, unknit her brow

and look for a promise from the sun

that shines across the border of

all that she has left behind

it’s always tomorrow, I can

pay you tomorrow, at the

corner bodega where the plantains

are bruised with contempt,

plump mangoes are petulant,

tease like the senoritas back home;

music fills the air and

trumpet melodies blare Latin rifts

reminding her of Pedro and Javier taunting,

their liquid language spilling on San Juan sidewalks,

as they hawk her stunning disregard for

stealth and manipulation

America: this country, this over-priced

advertisement for freedom,

does not fit into her stare;

she dreams of Puerto Rico,

honey sunsets, Poinciana

bleeding, sky-water beaches

that pull you out of bed

she is ample, taking up space that she does not own;

tomorrow she may do the wash

Baltimore Sketches: Starbucks He was the color of dust. Almost not here but dressed to go somewhere, he wore Cargo shorts, plaid shirt paunch, he was not certain if the world would hold him. The coffee haven was too tight for him, Like a shrunken laundry sweater; mostly students Vegas plans of big money and women on a stick, He had big ideas that crashed against his failures, Sipped his caffeine without tasting; The coffeehouse crowd did not notice his slump and ashes. They were bright and verticle, did not know defeat. Their path was leafy with white lilies drunk from the ride. They were young with the wind and he was bent thirty-five, slouching toward acrimony and regret. Blond dirt hair and pulp features could not aquiline into privilege. He was simply lost in the naked light of a summer sky. He could not find his way to the place where the winners hung out. They did not know him for they could not see him on their way to brass ring promises that flamed quick like excelsior from the fire of their youth. Beige. He was beige, not a color but a default position.

Baltimore Sketches: Malik Dark angles with cap spun back, a young urban cliché, with careless shorts, slung from the hip, khaki, faded tee shirt, hungry blue and pods growing from his ear, he was plugged into a crooked world, moved as if to make a fast break away from the police and contempt back to the hoop games on asphalt with soft poetry curse words that said “niggah please” and a white pearl smile as he looped, dribbled and jived his way to score; a ballet of by any means necessary His face was etched coal mined from some cruel joke some red, white and blue fantasy that life could be fair and God never gives you more than you can handle and poverty builds character; someone was laughing in a rigged poker game from hell Homegrown manchild stalks the streets resisting the notion that he is prey as white people scatter or cast a gray shadow that invites him into invisibility “smelling his piss,” his grandmother said with basketball schemes and cigarettes his mustache curved into suspicion. Nonetheless, he was eager about life, licking his lips to meet opportunity, gut it, and make it pay, but in a few years, his knife would hesitate and the blood would be his own.

Baltimore Sketches: Ebony

Dark ju ju doll, hair thatched a black helmet of discontent heavy lids over black button eyes, shiny beetle black and hiding behind thick spectacles that could make you think that she didn’t get out much Slender snatch of life, she lived quietly on the edges, taking notes on the pretenders, the gallant and bold, the grim hard-luck posers, the corporate downtown johnnies, the jovial thieves that would smile you into a shell game, the women addicted to illusion and the men fitting themselves into spaces that women thought they owned, but didn’t; she knew this and kept to herself; at the cleaners where she worked; they ate their mandoo and sweet potato noodles in her face, spoke Korean with hushed syllables laughing at her, words sliding up and down the scale life had not opened itself fully to who she was but she had a gift to read ahead and twist the plot into a design of her own making; her father was Middle Eastern a whiteness that was disguised in the blackness that burnt her skin; it was her mother from South Carolina stock and ancestral slaves that taught “shuffling” as an art form she knew how to shuffle as a tactic against insult and anonymity; dark enough to shame the night her smile was like daylight breaking, and on the horizon was a crimson sun that was ticking

Baltimore Sketches: Johnny his body had been cut hard from the high school swim team and trophies lined the dresser of his New Jersey bedroom where his parents forgot to imagine better times the world was suppose to be giving him something but it wasn’t coming through; at thirty-two he was square-jawed but nervous eyes close together piercing; glasses watching, expecting something over sharp nose and trendy beard stubble; he had followed all the white-boy rules with cowboy boots walking hard in the gray areas, just in case more was required he could do it, the unthinkable – which he thought about; he knew bright ivy college years where he had lived the dream and studied the angles in case a foul ball came his way after college there were the want ads and the recession; a nervous tick was forming in his right leg, twitching to be somewhere, ready to pounce like a feline but with less grace, his moves became more cagey, feral with the suspicion of something reneged – some “should have been” gone missing; he settled for a sales job and a wife who pressed tiny bits of tissue into tight little desperate balls. he had to trim the corners in order to catch up, edge into the fast lane away from the dark alleys, but he couldn’t figure out what he was chasing, or why his bedroom trophies had lost their shine