Pratt Street & I
This is Pratt Street, & I
walk it alone, sidewalks empty
of my childhood—the bodega
where we picked penny candies
using discarded couch
coins on our way to school,
walked Willow to the dopplered
sounds of Salsa beats blaring by,
by the saintly scents of the botanica
where the orisha hid
behind Catholic masks praying
to gods long abandoned,
forgotten,
forlorn.
This is Pratt Street, & I
walk it alone, from 2031
to Hampstead Hill,
a shoe factory
excuse for a school
where black fights white
near twin octopi
in the valley
of Patterson Park
every Friday—
part of some neverending race
riot ritual that amounts to pushes
& shoves & not much else.
I'm asked to choose
sides; but how do I
pick a fight that's not mine?
This is Pratt Street, & I
walk it alone, across the vast
expanse of Patterson Park,
past an out of place pagoda
sitting atop a hill I hear
blasted British ships from high
cannons—Hampstead Hill, the real
one, not its namesake school
I feel doomed
to attend, where last
week a kid lit a fire
in a trashcan, sending
the Hungarian French teacher
to Sheppard Pratt,
Baltimore's Bellevue
in my view.
This is Pratt Street, & I
walk it alone, past a boat lake
without boats, rainhouses
protecting young lovers
hidden in the shadows
of its iron archways held
together by rivets
the size of my fists, basketball
courts full of netless rims,
8811 sipping
coffee in his patrol
car until he feels
ready to emerge
just to harass middle
schoolers for whom he holds
particular unwarranted antipathy,
& past those damned octopi—
upon one’s back I kissed a girl
who dumped me the next
day because I was too short,
or too dark,
or too both.
This is Pratt Street, & I
walk it alone every Saturday
past Obrycki's, always flanked
by limos & smelling of Old Bay,
to Broadway by two to get to
the only Hispanic store I knew,
open that one day, only until four,
to pick up some Sazon, recao,
plátanos, y guayaba for mami
to earn my malta that I will down
ice cold between Bank & Gough
& be briefly tasted back to Hoboken,
home again, until it wasn't.
This is Pratt Street, & I
walk it alone every summer
for one weekend in June
when Fells Point transforms
into a chimera—a fusion
of sounds & scents & accents
reminiscent of my childhood,
but muddied by the blend
of cultures sharing nothing
with me but a language,
until eight when the sun drops
low in the horizon & Salsa fills
the air—congas laying rhythms
that carry the weight of blowing
horns, colored by the calling
chorus & the response cutting
through it all from the dulcet
voice of el cantante,
& I get lost in the crowd
of dancers flipping their hips
& spinning, & I close
my eyes, letting it all
wash over me like a Caribbean
wave & I twirl & finally find
myself,
home.
Originally published in A Lovely Place, a Fighting Place, a Charmer: The Baltimore Anthology (2022)
edited by Gary M Almeter & Rafael Alvarez.
