Sushi in Brooklyn: A Dedication to Walt Whitman

Sushi in Brooklyn: A Dedication to Walt Whitman




walt whitman is not a dead man is not an esteemed poet

he is a housing development on carlton avenue
across the street from the park once a fort he helped to name
whitman is a rusted otis elevator stuck between floors
a cramped project apartment an eyelash away from an overpass
where the noise of the coming and going of cars is weighed
against pissy elevators to determine the height of project
 windows
which open on to the stench of makeshift landfills which surround
whitman's namesake because the incinerators have been bolted for
 nearly one year

walt whitman is myrtle avenue at night
a foggy ancient black man muttering to passers
they are coming white people are coming
it's almost a scene from a slave narrative
and there is talk of mounted police officers to protect the park
that whitman named and my friend ticks statistics about
her garbage being picked up three days a week
because they are coming

I've heard tell that they come check in hand offer you money for
 your soul
when you are tired key in the door home from work
and what are you worth what were you worth on the shores
on an auction block signing your name is easy
why shouldn't you have it easy gentrification is just a word
but tired is an emotion you've been dealing with for years

it's all enough to send us all into the streets crazy because
 someone is coming
when six blocks from the projects you can sit at an outdoor cafe
while a blond woman with a british accent brings you sushi
and your friends click their tongues laughing
if our parents didn't town these houses we'd never be able to
 live here

and I am of the old school a sooth sayer believer in haints and
 hosannas and walt whitman is a living black man with a gray
 beard walking myrtle avenue
I bring him cigarettes give him a dollar he calls me his daughter

every week he writes me poetry and I bring him a brick from his
 namesake

MONIQUE SEMONE FERRELL is a native New Yorker who is currently a lecturer at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Quarterly West, Alaska Quarterly, African Voices, and North American Review, among others.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning