LatinosUSA

“Rocket tennis,” how the apartments’ tenants
keep score, keep perspective, laugh, save a bloody sliver
of sanity, so they don’t throw open the scarred door
to run out into the debris strewn street,
believing they can win the game, leap the net,
shake hands, before they leave their city
with one more breath and their trophies in pieces.

At times it’s background noise, the radio left on
in the kitchen. Sometimes the reception so broken,
it’s a constant sizzle that they shout over to be heard.
They make up their own reports, asking yet again:
when did it start? when will it stop? when will their bodies
ever relax? always measuring the distance
and the incoming direction, maybe from beyond Gustav Street?
or farther out on Grimm Road? And when it’s quiet
count who is still standing?

The distant tapping, each prisoner locked
in solitary confinement, communicating
with the broken-off corner of a concrete block,
tapping out a message. Only the basics:
why is she here and how long? has she been tortured?
is she getting enough food? are there cockroaches
swimming in her cold gruel? is the tapping a steady drip
into a metal pan or the rapping of a distant machine gun
that rushes into her dream of escape?

She stands in the living room paralyzed
hearing the windows rattle, the walls shiver,
the glass shattered into stilettos, everywhere
the air bleeding through the air, the odd chiming
of what can never be pieced back together,
a blinded kaleidoscope scattered across the floor.
Car alarms go off, a scream from the street,
a scream from next door, a scream frozen inside
her throat that she will never be able to spit out.
On either side of the net, “love” is zero.