memory

east river north brooklyn is an ugly sweater, building faces are square blocks of old world wool weave in tones that remind you of simpler times when nothing is pick from silver / white / black / a four-set box of crayons -- you got the whites that are more like cracked eggshell cream, blacks that have sepia leaked into them -- sort of like loose coffee grinds, or the trace mud tracks of your pooping pup trod on motley gray sidewalks (a variety of concretes as useful as tree rings on wood chips, you know they're from a different era, but would never know which), silvers that are actually lighter tones of pastel painted metal siding on an overcast day, and colors that smirk furtive to incendiary, but never ever melancholy, from one second to the next. square blocks of uncompromisingly antiquated tones, horizontals running next to verticals like post-war abstract expressionists finding their redemption in the repetition they despised: a black wrought iron fence around public school plays a rhythm with every twenty-fourth stem painted some primary color. bricks stick out, earth humps that sticky trees point out from, lint, a tiny accidental knot woven into the grid. twisted acrylic letters, sans serif signage making dead pan words: this is what it is. it's an ugly sweater worn a hundred times before you ever put it on. threads with stories from some other time, holes you didn't make, you can only imagine how they got there. we get cozy because it's cold. there's nothing to prove, nothing to hide.