Night slides in slick and slowly. We melt to sighing pools
beside the kitchen grease and air conditioner drool.

A woman yells at her child, you bitch! The girl is shrieking, her body twisting
inside out. Her brother picks her up, holds her by her middle
while her mother continues on cursing by the curbside.

I, peering from the second story, slip back behind the curtain
and fall into my chair. Would I have been the child, dying of remorse
or the mother, stretched and pulled to her fingertips end?

The heat intoxicates, dives you straight to slouched behind a dumpster, pants falling
off your ass, head rolling side to side, repeating I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Living a concave life, everyone slumps a little,
even Upper East Side leggy tanned power women strain
to throw their shoulders back, cell phones threaten to slip between their hands.

And yet we never imagine becoming one of them, those the city left
for dead, roaming the subways among us and aren’t we always
only two steps from falling or slipping or jumping to the tracks -
We lean in to monitor the approaching light, we stand jutting
our hips out and pull our shoulder bags to safety seconds
before the train swooshes in.

In the Blackout meringue rolls from car doors, families lounge
on stoops and in doorways, candles slip
from their holders, brownstones burst one by one into flames.

One block over the hydrant still soars from afternoon’s heyday.
Underweared children who left it for dinner pause in slumber. Underneath us nothing
rumbles and for one blank moment the street is pitch black and poised

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