Anxiety hums through my pores
like stink off an egg salad sandwich in the sun.
What an ethereal reek,
deep like the Brooke Street Quarry;
whose cliffs looked like
the sound of a quarter cutting away
at the enamel of a scratch-off lottery ticket.
In 1993,
Ole Randall rooted his femurs down through the boulders,
breaking through the skin of his buttery soles,
the bones binding to that spot beneath the dirt.
Their screams echoed through that space,
the ones evicted from suburbia’s,
who bought real estate beneath the water.
They did not come all at once,
its urbanization was slow,
but now a small Atlantis of condos has formed,
the lake a feminine bath.
Their echoes still ring up to him,
“we’re not strong”
and He calls back in vengeance,
with a laugh of howling steam
pushing through the face of a steel kettle
“be patient”. She was born six years later,
Friday baby.
Life treated her sweet like a terrace canopy,
But He would never turn her gray.
She only felt scared after she hit the water,
like the air after a rainstorm,
cold nostril mist and midday warnings
from a Grandfather long before:
“You’ll need to protect yourself”
A Morto Pesce,
scraps of unease,
scattered lottery ticket mounds upon the table of my memory.
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