I Have Never Been Hotter
Than the Summers I Lived in Brooklyn — Free Verse
I have never been hotter
than the summers I lived
in Brooklyn.
My 4th floor walk-up with no AC.
The lobby vibrating with heat,
the first floor family draped across the space under the stairwell,
listening to music that drifted upward
but not too far. Nothing, no one, moved
too much. All the walls were sticky,
the banister caked with decades of sweat, the black and white entryway
tiles hallucinatory.
I remember waking from sleep that felt exactly like a fever
three, four times in a single night,
stumbling to the claw foot tub,
taking ice cold showers,
just long enough so I quit feeling like I
was cooking,
grabbing a pop from the freezer on my way back to bed,
laying on my futon and dripping cherry, lemonade, blue raspberry
onto my bare, wet chest, the fan blowing
and somehow, finally,
slipping off into more sleep.
Heat melted time.
Garbage wept.
Streets steamed.
Cockroaches gloated.
Tar ran.
When people complain when it’s hot now,
I think back to those Brooklyn nights
and wonder
how I ever managed to stay
how I ever managed to leave.
