Slim-trunked & grasping life from under 

a concrete driveway strewn with miscellany:

food wrappers, receipts tenants tossed

from windows.  The tree removal service truck’s

plastic net dragged away the oak.  Shadeless 

summer boiled my kitchen & the neighbors

commenced deck renovations – summer of hammers.

Summer of big box wood from another tree

from somewhere else.  The day they cut the oak 

I cried on my couch, helpless under buzz saws.  

The little girl I was flicked marbles at the inner curves

of my ribs: this life, too, at others’ mercy.  

I cried

even to Roberto, the super, as he paced Winthrop Street

picking chicken bones clean with his teeth, 

an open styrofoam tray from El Castillo de Jagua

flat on his palm.  A line of pigeons followed

Roberto – yellow rice grains slipped to the pavement

as he walked, he & the birds voracious.  He always smelled

faintly of Presidente.  Turned glassy eyes to the oaks 

that lined the block.  Public property no homeowner 

could trounce.You know, he mused, once  was in love with a woman

from my church.  We never made love.  I asked her 

to marry me.  She said, ‘Si tú me das, yo te doy.’

Y eso no es lo que quiero yo.  La dejé.  Money wins.  

He turned & went into the building.

Those neighbors held Trini parties in summer.

Memorial to Labor Day, I resigned myself –

soca displaces sleep Friday to Sunday.  O sea –

I resigned myself during the day.  At night 

I’d toss & curse, naked atop the flat sheet

in a room I was too cheap to air condition.

Machel Montano’s toxic positivity, his

even when we fall out, bredrin we go all out

made of me a mortal enemy.  Still I saved my scowl

not for the tree-felling Trinis but for the one 

white guy in the building.  He tried

to rally me to sign a letter & tape it

on the offenders’ door.  I nudged past his left

shoulder to the Q, didn’t utter a word, 

underslept & edgy in too-bright sunshine

where the oak once stood.