no shirt beneath, fly open, revealing bare skin, a limp penis.
He nods and wakes, rocking to the subway car’s motion,
and I fear if I rise, go one car over, I will rouse him,
and he will follow. No one here but us, no other passengers
clutch metal poles or lean against the walls as the train
hurtles further into the Bronx. They’ve long since
noticed his smell, this man whose shoes flap loose,
his brown skin deadly grey, eyes bloodshot and raw.
I’m silent as he sways, tugs on the rope around his waist,
turning my head away from the thought
of what he might move, how he might reach across
this chugging car. I don’t stir, put my textbook
in front of my face, hope that because he’s black
and I’m black that he won’t hurt me.
I am one stop from my stop, but when the train
reaches Parkchester, I dart through the closing doors,
knowing I’m too far from home to walk.
In silence, in shadow, this girl reads words—
sounds discrete as bricks, jagged as shards
of bottles smashed against the library’s
concrete steps, its entrance an alley
reeking of piss, booze, its pavement
giving way, cracked along city fault lines.
Inside, one room of warmth and dirt,
floor wax and gum wrappers, paperbacks
thumbed and stamped with inky due dates,
hardcovers wrapped in yellowed cellophane,
tables and chairs with initials carved
into them, damage sunk deep in wood.
Here I learn the potency of words,
their sounds resounding in my head,
ears, equilibrium shaken,
words destined for my preteen ribcage,
my body a bony geometry. Here,
the hours teem with voices, their rhythms;
coiled tense, I lean on words and love
all this—broken bindings, smudged print,
fondled pages, my library card,
warm slip frayed in my taut grip.
Pretending for Mother’s sake to be interested in medicine,
I’d go to school Saturdays too, ride the train
from the Bronx to Manhattan’s high-rise hospitals
for special classes for gifted students, bright minority kids,
future doctors. What I remember most aren’t equations
or experiments, brilliant liquids poured from one test tube
to another, into beakers, or the friendly med students
who tried to make a scientist of me, despite stolid resistance.
What I remember most are the bodies, cadavers laid out
on metal slabs, skin cold, clammy after formaldehyde.
During the week, medical students sawed and flayed
these anonymous people, not knowing on weekends
high school students studied their cuts: chest cavities
pried open, ribcages splayed. I was never much good
at telling one organ from another, fascinated instead
by the waxy, sticky buildup of cholesterol in bloodless
arteries. I didn’t quite know what we were looking for—
their legs rigid, skin over them mottled, yellowish-
brown and gray, unsettling sepia—wasn’t sure
how dead bodies could make my future better,
only knowing my mother wanted a doctor
in our family, her own lungs cancer-heavy,
her dream to live to see me graduate. Dutiful,
I’d spend Saturdays examining empty hands,
stiffened fingers, limbs and torsos,
tendons and ligaments stringy, stretched,
muscles drained yet fibrous. I tried
not to stare at faces, at gaping nose holes,
slack but rubbery ears, at mouths
I could push open, then push shut.
Neighbors trained their dogs mean,
fenced them and chained them,
whipped their flanks with rope
or wire, until their dogs would pounce
on any stranger happening by.
Didn’t matter whether the dog
was terrier or Pekingese, boxer
or mongrel, neighborhood dogs
could yelp themselves into such fury
that there were houses I’d hurry past
coming home from school, book bag
bouncing on my shoulder, socks
sagging around skinny ankles.
So when one sudden fist of a dog
leapt up to bite me, his teeth
piercing two red rows below the crook
of my arm, I scurried home even faster
to show my father the damage.
He went to start a shouting match
with the dog’s owner, both of them
yelling, cursing, the dog’s owner
in Spanglish, my father in threats
of wrathful retribution.
Fearing rabies, Father pulled me
by my other arm, sat me in the car,
and drove me to Jacobi Hospital,
where I waited on a hard-backed chair,
clutching my arm, peering at the punctures
that scrap of a dog had made,
while gunshot victims rolled past
on metal gurneys. When a young doctor
finally approached, he chuckled,
said I think you’ll live, then shot me
with some syringe that made my arm
ache more. He turned away, laughing,
white