By Yeabfikir Ayele

Gardens are expensive nowadays because
peace is in demand since paradise is
out of the question.

But pray tell what has been the hold up
I’ve been on hold waiting in a hurricane rolling
through my neighborhood kind of like
an addiction like cohesive alphabets rolling off
of tongues rebuking their coexistence in a sentence
kind of like a line or
two of cocaine kind of like the scenes playing in a
mother’s mind when her kid is a few minutes late.

They call it the hood for a reason; no neighbor, mother, father, child, adult to claim it, to raise it. Cohesion is only in the hood, the blood, a flood of the white stuff is coating the flowers in the backyard from the erased blackboards but still they sniff it just in case.

“cheap chalk?”

“you know what they say”

“what?”

“do you think i’d be here if i knew”

An angel is on guard cause
they defended wisdom from a fool.
they said pray tell and the fool told them

“it’s a bullet proof plan”

they forgot his skin is the holster moving up the torso
to deliver them to the hands of their evil.
now they’re in a garden in the backyard with the white stuff
he tells them to snort it out of its misery
they oblige and bam
a bullet or two in their chest.
run back to the arms of the hood;
it’s getting lonely and cold without the
warm blood streaming downstream
a tributary kissing another line or two till kingdom come.

Photo by Yeabfikir (A cold night in D.C.)
Edited March 28, 2024