The rain had just finished saying, This block is mine.
The kind of rain where you could sleep through two
breakthroughs, and still have enough left to belly-sing
the ambrosial hour.
Blood pellets in the dusk & dashes of hail were perfect for
finding new stashes; that is to say, visitations were never
announced.
A broken umbrella handle posed a question by the day
care center.
A good time to crush a love on a stoop, to narrate through
a window, to find the heartbeat of solitude, and collect
gallons for the Bruja’s next baño.
Good conditions to be in the dialectic of O Wow Ooo Baby O
Shit Ooo Damn.
The perfect weather to master the art of standing under a bodega
awning, shifting crisis to profit.
There’s always a dreamer who thinks they can race the rain to
the building, who loves the smell of wet concrete, and uses
a good downpour to be discreet.
There’s always one toddler who quietly crawls off the top step,
dodges a thunderbolt, and quickly becomes fluent in all
things stormy weather.
Story goes that Don Julio was swept up, ripped around the
corner, stumbled & cartwheeled to the light post, but he
never let go of his porkpie hat.
An improvised ballet near an improvised rivulet.
Shopping bags, pulverized by branches, contort into a new
nation of black flags. Our block was our island.
The manhole on the corner perked with popsicle sticks, empty
beer cans, and the brown sole of a fake karate slipper as we
started to sink & boil.
The forecast, you said, was type perfect.
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From The Crazy Bunch by Willie Perdomo, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Willie Perdomo.
