Beyond the fluttering of wings on the fire escape, I see the
funeral parlor.
I saw police block off the streets. I saw a multitude of
people of different colors united in their grief for a boy who dreamed of becoming
a cop. In that funeral home, I once attended the wake for a cop that grew up on
our neighborhood. His name was Jessie Nazario. He worked out of the
stationhouse on Story Ave.
The police commissioner came to pay his respects and walked
out somber to the cameras of the news media and crowd with cell phones among
signs with the legend that read
Justice For Junior
Junior was dragged out of a bodega and butchered by a
Dominican gang. According to detectives, it was the same one responsible for
the multiple stabbings of another Dominican boy on June 18 2018.
I was shot at while playing hide and seek in the time when
The Bronx looked like parts of Britain after Blitzkrieg. I saw swastikas sewn
onto the denim and leather jackets of a Puerto Rican gang called The Savage
Skulls.
I saw them butcher an innocent man with chains and planks of
wood with nails. The man looked up with blood running down his face like Jesus
forced to wear a crown of thorns. He let out a scream born from the insanity of
mindless violence.
He ran screaming across the street where a car almost hit
him. He took refuge in a butcher shop run by Cubans. The gang tried to storm
the shop to drag out that poor man but the Cubans stood their ground as they
had done when they took to the seas to escape Communism.
I was haunted by the horrors I’ve seen in my childhood as
haunted as the children of The New Millennium of school massacres in greater
regularity.
People move on to the next tragedy and pray that tragedy
that doesn’t befall on them.
I looked up and saw chickens on a conveyor. Their squawking
silenced by a quick dip into a vat of scalding water. Featherless, the chickens
were individually placed on scales, packaged and sold, one to my mother. I saw
the quiet eyes of lambs and goats stare at me. I was in a slaughterhouse in The
South Bronx where my mother was served eviction papers after she broke her arm
due to the negligence of the landlord’s workers that were finally summoned by
city inspectors to make repairs. On the face of a kitchen clock on the wall is
the Lamb of God in The Last Supper. I eat my meals like I’m on Death Row
related to the thief nailed next to a Good Jewish Lawyer who promised to get
the thief off the hooks by breaking the law that states there no second acts in
American lives or the lives of people on Earth. I wake up. I feed the birds.
Beyond the fluttering of wings, I see the funeral parlor and beyond the blue.
