Brooklyn

Christian Fazio
ENGL
Advanced Fiction
Tony Barnstone
03/07/2007
Brooklyn
In winter, trains hiss by eye-like windows, carrying with them, steam and blank-faced passengers peering into bedrooms. They ride along steel, green spider-webs that carry them above the, blinking tiny shops, with constant swinging doors. Below, stark, skinny trees sprout from concrete, holding close, ice, dangling from branches, while stark wind tears snow from branches. While tiny apartment push through topsoil as if planted—carrying rectangle windows, and doors, in greed, red and blue, that fade and change like seasons. Which sit above and below the myriad of neon signs and tire-ripped snow. Compressed and hardened by the snow, made black by road tar and the plows, with constant beeping and blinking yellow lights.
While inside, men and women dream, cook, fight and make love behind drawn blinds; their grunts, laughter, and profanity wafting through thin walls. While kids play in the streets, screaming, laughing, while Italian and Puerto Rican mothers beckon them to come in. And meat is for sale, spouting from the lips of men with thick accents and olive skin that very well could be my uncle. While car horns blare and hands slap chrome hoods.
While the air stinks like sausage, peanuts, collard greens, MSG, olive oil and fish, coupled by the fumes of exhaust, as taxi’s and mini-vans clog the arteries of great high-ways— Complicated by sweat and hair-gel, cigarettes and sewage, wafting from apartment balconies, from subway stations, and grandparents houses. Holding close Catholicism and olive green aluminum siding. Tracked with snow and clothing, in the bed we made that was still your sisters and I was still a freshman. Here and now in the desert of California, I wonder if I will ever feel this way again.