“A Brooklyn House”

A Brooklyn house

Is where I met, then left you—us

In winter time, Alastriona and Ellie,

As stories of living, eternal memory

Haven’t I forgotten, how our little family

Of vagabonds, vagrants and New York City,

From Ditmas Park to Flushing, we’re on the 7

To meet Kyoko and her sister, then Sunnyside

For Calixto and his chessboard, smoking bedi’s

At Washington Square Park, where Adray prayed

And that boy named Lauren-who was gay, played

His shortwave; our asylums of pain were apothecary,

If-poetry breathing through each other’s eyes,

But now, we’re getting complex as time goes by,

And on February 1st, 2023—we’ll always remain

Friends and lovers of a time lost to serpentine light,

The remnants of winter’s flesh, pulping the skyline

Becoming shaved ice over dioramas and playhouses,

Our theatre was a playground of traumas

Enacted inside Brooklyn rowhouses and tenements

As the Q-train rumbles from its earthly shelter,

Of a morning so grey and opaque you can taste

The rain percolating against the subway pane,

Always a part of the wind, your fingers flowers

Stretching purer towards the firmament azure

Though there we were, complex but still kids

Circa 2013—23, playing Final Fantasy XIII,

Within your bedroom’s darkness on a projector,

Because change isn’t letting yourself age,

But learning how to behave, and to live;

Time is not a sentence, but a love language

A conversation endless, to remember who we were

When—how, we used to belong together, to each other

Forever in a tucked-in, Little Odessa apartment village

Between other houses as the above ground train shook

Thunder into their kitchens, Christmas lights in winter

An oceanic bliss and abyss, forgotten princes and abbesses,

Of white sand littered crinkled ice, underneath old blankets

Belonging your sister away at college, the lives of our unwritten,

My old life into the next fiction; a Brooklyn house, I imagined

 © 2023, A. M. D’Angelo