Return

A fine mist of rain falls silent on his thin, sharp-angled face. He picks up the pace and tilts his head to the wind. He walks through the plundered slumber of crumbled poverty, abandoned, in human acclimation to feral creatures who crawl and scuff their blood-rough nails on the concrete remains of multi-ethnic, immigrant history. He walks on and hears the oddly familiar sounds coming from his once attended Public School#59. Echoes still drift along the faded asphalt haze of time. These echoes ring with elemental bones of hope: children breaking out and through the gunmetal gray, graffiti scarred doors to be swallowed by the saturated heat of inner-city rage. Past gothic, orthodox, cathedral mausoleums which sit darkly, like ancient stoics, and stare through amber and crystalline-blue stained-glass eyes, focused outward with a small kernel of eternal mustard seed hope: One day, souls will once again return to warm the sacerdotal pews with holy order flesh and faith. Past the Puerto Rican market where a dead pig's head leads the carnivore parade of mastication promise every day. A meat market window of letted-blood and death reminiscent of Amsterdam whores who sit naked in street-level windows exposing their pale, dissipated bodies to the stares of dead-eyed, vacant, male hunger outside. He comes to the grime and grit of an empty lot covered by old and broken concrete slabs. He stops and lets his mind wander back in time. He sees a woman, wearing a ratted, fox-tail wrap around her neck. She holds a long, un-filtered cigarette, loose, between her her bright, fuchsia painted lips. She wears a black velvet hat with a veil to her nose. A straight black dress that flows below her knees and stops mid-calf above her high-heel, shiny-black, patent leather shoes. He can almost see, through the blur of a chiaroscuro choreography, his mother conversing with the Kazakhstan neighbors of his youth, in the haze of this dreamlike memory. She would hold her cigarette between fuchsia lips and wear that ratted fox-tail wrap until one day, finally, the cancer cough began to spew Chesterfield blood on the molted fox-tail head of her belov-ed fur. Then she went to bed. Went to sleep. And died. Quietly, pigeons gathered and cooed on that slate-gray, New York City dawn.