The Women of Highbridge Park
It’s noon on Sunday and they gather
around black milk crates placed in a circle
on tattered blue fishing tarp. It’s not quite
March, but it’s one of those fluke
hot-weather days, and they are so prepared
for spring: swapping old records
packed in cardboard cartons,
daisies tucked behind their ears,
gossiping in the kind of Spanish
from the kitchens of my past. Last night
at the bar in a flurry of bitterness
I chucked my full beer
at the bathroom wall, then walked
the thirty blocks home. Today
I am thinking about the significance
of grass and how I came here because I want
to get better at being a person,
but every day I begin to know less
about who I am to America. All I know
is a small girl emerges from the trees
waving a stick, hollers to her mother
that the large scrap of rock she’s been resting on
is lake water, bottle shards scattered
across its surface like glittering
jagged pieces of a life.
I have been trying more each year
to be comfortable, and maybe
a little bit proud of how I’ve learned
to make a home, all this daylight
kicking toward the lawn to give
what little it owes.
