3rd Place Judge Selection
The big gray two-family, one down from the corner,
Is all but abandoned now.
It stands three blocks from Brighton Beach,
Its brick steps cracked and crumbling,
Tired from cousins running up and down,
Dragging toys and shouting over one another.
Mothers—his own gone gray too young,
Whose deep blue eyes he used to drown in as she chastised him—
Used to cook dinner at the old gas stove, which
Used to sit in the spot where the wallpaper fades to yellow brown.
The room still smells of British-bastardized pirozhki.
He told me this was a place of suffering:
Home to feuding sides.
Maybe it’s the teapot, missing from the cupboard,
Whose magic ran out in ’79,
When he met me down in Chinatown
And brought back, uninvited, the scent of Orient.
Now, in the crawlspaces where those cousins used to hide,
There lives a pride of feral kittens, mud in their manes,
Some with poked-out eyes, disgraced by the rats in the ceiling.
He tells me that it’s fine, it’s better off now,
Tomorrow the cats will run out—or they won’t,
As the house crumbles down and
Everything is buried under one more layer
Of “Goodbye.”
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