My Brooklyn

Charles Swett

O cold Brooklyn night
Dark and damp
Mist and wet soot
Shiny streets
Reflect blue and yellow neon
Mr. Chianese
Closes his grocery
Someone's dog
Barks in the distance

Last bus of the evening
Limps from one stop to the next
With its pot bellied men
Reading their newspapers
Who will climb to their two-rooms
To munch the sandwiches
Left by already sleeping wives
Sip a beer
And tumble into bed, exhausted

The smell
Of a thousand suppers
Drifting down ancient streets
To join a forgotten ocean
Of earnest hopes
For working class children
And fleeting tender thoughts
Of maybe lovers
All dashed against the grimy cobblestones

Ghosts
Of Dutch settlers
Playing ten-pins
Roll a ball
Toward shivering hookers
The pure and the soiled
Share the night

A grandmother's gray hair
Kissed that morning
Hangs caught in the shoestore sign
Waving in the chilly breeze.

 

Jack Pollard

"Jeffrey, can you come out and play?" 12 years old on Kings Highway and Bedford Avenue.

Cabbage, tobacco, old people, smells that gently cover you as you run up the steps of your apartment.

Stickball and basketball at the school yard after school. Walking down the highway after, buddies for life, "Got a quarter?"

Sure they did, get a soda, candy and bullshit about stuff. School, cool hallways, Never go in the bathroom!!! Teachers who actually cared about you.

Summer was GREAT! Days of hanging out, playing all the day away. Go home and eat, fast, then out into the night. Soft and warm, lights of cars as ya leaned against the library walls. Checking out the girls, acting tough, lime-rickeys at the candy stores.

I guess these are the images that I remember from growing up in Brooklyn!

Readers' reports continue . . .

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