Gentrification

After forty years the brownstones 
still seemed the same except
for the newer cars and the people
in fashionable clothes walking
golden dogs in chic comfort vests,
all living in houses he couldn’t afford.

He couldn’t believe he grew up here
when the streets were lively
with black live matter
and Gerald every summer 
out there  with his roller
painting fatsfix’s store front red. 

Now there sits Wray’s fancy drink café, 
his name in a stylish white font
outcropping from a charcoal awning,
a cocktail glass replacing the Y, a large
BLACKLIVESMATTER banner out front, 
proudly put there by its white owner.

 The old El Diamantet is now 
Castro’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine  
sharing space with a Dunkin’ Donuts
with expensive bicycles racked 
to the declining handicap ramp.
The Mobil on Fuller- a Citgo Market.

The Meats and Greens turned Bamboo’s
and the farmacia now just  a pharmacy,
and the biggest insult of them all,
New Murken’s Restaurant which 
served the best corn-beef sandwhiches 
is an “eat big, leave happy” Mega  Bites.

The homebuds  had split, vanished 
to memories of stinging high fives,
basketball jams and feeling up
Zoe on a fine Friday night,  the smell 
of her  lingering in forty years  of regret.
There’ll be no bros coming from  these doors.

His heart  felt the sting of going home to a home 
that was no longer his and no longer wanted him.
That past was a meat offering to this new block-
as if his blood and flesh had been scrubbed away 
in the white wash of neatly trimmed roses behind
spiked  fences-  as if that there of his never happened. 

“What was here before we came?” he imagined 
the children asking the parents behind the doors.
“Nothing of note,” they would reply using the 
same line the real estate agent routinely recited 
to anyone who inquired about what existed 
before the abattoir came and moved  on.