Hotbeds in Norfolk, Virginia

It’s nothing to be woken by the hammering

racket of collapse. To bathe with tap-

drip the tint of hands’ sun sides. Life

among ruins means something is falling

at all times. Means knowing how long I have

to get out from under a spreading shadow.

Today, they flattened the house across the street

into memory—siding panels rotting like rinds

in the yard’s clovers and crabgrass. It’s constant,

the vinyl harvest: red, yellow, pink—all stripped

to the same blanched flesh. To make a space

more enticing, they say. But I was fed

on sweetness sprung up from dirt, and nobody

skins an apple they intend to candy.

O’Hara wrote, once, about Norfolk.

Said to have exercised here—blown

breath into air, here—is to have been to bed

with a Nigra and what a way to admit knowing

a place only by the way it looks from above,

when on top of it, moving in

and out of it at will.

Last week, they erased the turquoise house,

its kitchen where I learned not to play around

the hot stove, where I earned these scars,

the one my love grazes nightly with lips

brown like water, like mine.

It’s impossible to sleep alone

without the voices I know

better than my own.

Someone silenced the rocks

we used to kick down the blacktop, their scrapes

filling the gaps in conversation. Someone keeps

sticking the same pink slips between my locked door

and its frame. Someone sprayed the big weed

that planted itself in the fractured concrete

before we could even bend our tongues

to dub it   flower. Soon, all the wrong green

will be brought to wilt.

Truth is, there are many Norfolks full

of our deep hotbeds, our colorful plots. It’s nothing

to pass one while driving, to speed up at the first

sign of us: the rubbled lot of a First, or Second,

or Seventh Baptist Church, for instance—

the black dust of its crumbling

never allowed to settle. And so you roll

your windows up, tighten your hold

on your breath.