for Sahbabii’s Pull Up Wit Ah Stick
It is dark and I hear my neighbors cheering. They are airing the Mayweather fight in their backyard. I see two bobbing bodies. Men. They are holding glass bottles. If those bodies holding bottles move down the driveway and to the street, they are illegal.
In the background, blocks away, I hear the wallop of police sirens. Are they hungry for Black glass breaking? Do they want to pull shards of glass from their gums? Do they lick the shards hoping to taste blood’s sweetness?
The cheers now sound like cries. An upset; in which direction? Mayweather won. Even if he didn’t, the purse justified the circus. Although he should, he doesn’t have shit to worry about.
The police are quiet, hoping to dissolve into the night. I know this because sometimes I see their lights flash and hear their yowl clear. I do not move. Then they turn everything off. A cruel warning. It doesn’t matter because some people have an unaccountable sense for the police. A preternatural aerial view. Like birds. That’s why some gangs chirp.
The match is over and the neighbors are laughing. A gathering where the fight is scheduled and money the only chip to bargain is what some would call an easy party.
Above, a police helicopter passes. The searchlights are on but the helicopter doesn’t sound very close to the ground. Not low enough to disrupt any ordinary, long silence. Not low enough to make the air beneath the helicopter hard to breathe and the ground stir, and move.
The gathering has thinned. It’s cold, or too cold for now, and tonight begs to marry a blanket. My hands are stiff and my toes are numb. It is August.
The helicopter is gone. It flew in the direction of Queens. What’s funny is there have been times I’ve endangered people by pledging my allegiance to the police. Having these officers around. Having these officers around makes me feel deeply guilty.
The block wears light well. The block is decked out with streetlights emitting a warm orange glow. It’s beautiful for New York. Old. A neighborhood both remote and under surveillance.
There’s a ghost house down the block. It’s a ghost house because no one lives there but someone did. We don’t know where the people went (another subsidized house of the city most likely) but the boarded up windows and brown cracked grass remind us they are, in truth, gone. Gone. What a funny word. Final but perpetual. And the agony tied to accepting an ending. The heart aches, wondering if there is any way to work around final, just to buy time. To figure out the best goodbye, and never being able to come up with one. Always settling on ”later”. Gone. I told you it’s a ghost house. The windows are boarded up because there was fire. The side of the house is burned, the protective outer layer singed and dangling. The stories about the house might be bigger than what it really was but here is the one I know. The occupants were loud and Jamaican. Their front yard was the receptacle for all the candy wrappers and cigarette butts that blew in from the street.
I don’t know what the backyard looked like.
They were careless. Once K- leaped from her seat, on my verandah, and sprinted into the street to grab the round waist of a barefooted toddler who had run out into it. Once a fight broke out between two men, one squat and bowlegged, and they threw garbage cans at each other. The bowlegged man, father of the barefoot baby, was always caught in the web of some farce. And his mother, a rotund woman with lips always pried open with insult, sat on the cement stairs with her legs spread wide and ankle length skirt hiked up; ready and vexed. Those are the only three I remember. Everyone else? The people that regularly came and went? Faceless.
The story really is the house caught fire because of an unattended cigarette. The story really is the floors were covered in worn and soiled mattresses– even in the kitchen. The story really is drugs were found hidden in a wall. All of those faceless people came and went to mine the wall’s ore. That’s the story I know.
It is dark and it is quiet. Every so often a car rolls past. The party is over. The police haunt and hide. It is early Sunday morning.
joselia hughes 