Erik Rosen: Leaving Brooklyn

Camphor apartments,
creaky stairs and cockroaches,
shaky elevators that smelled of cigars and sweat,
parking lots with breaking waves of shattered glass,
Playboys stacked in hidden stashes on rooftops,
small basement congregations of Holocaust survivors begging for minyans,
the lurching smell of herring and cream,
and every ten minutes the steel shriek of a train
clattering along the El like a wounded animal.
Obese matriarchs leaning from windowsills:
Mrs. Oster, Mrs. Solomon, Mrs. Unger,
those grandmothers in cheap housedresses
who saw the promised land in courtyards crowded with rats and clotheslines,
who carried the memories of pogroms etched on their faces, inked on their pouchy arms,
who were content to cook pots of borscht red like clotted blood
and watch their grandchildren play stoopball and tag.

.

The small room with dusty sunlight where my grandfather lay,
oozing sore on his propped diabetic foot,
the steep stairs my grandmother fell down in the blackout of ‘76.
She was blind,
and it must have seemed a forever of yawning terror.
Months of bus rides to the hospital to watch her shrink,
until she finally disappeared.

.

Brooklyn, where peace could be found on a rusty fire escape,
the cool, dark passage between the street and the courtyard,
and the tarry roof that stuck to our sneakers
while we watched the end-of-the-world show
every fourth of July.

—

for Steve Kowit

Copyright 2015 Erik Rosen