Poetfolio

The Next Great American Novel Is Just A Sound Bite By Danny Aponte

The old stove was leaking gas in an old apartment in The South Bronx.

Three days before Thanksgiving Day, the pipes of the kitchen sink burst in an apartment where my mentally battered mother had lived in since the last days of Watergate. The new landlords told her to move to the other side of the building where long time residents were being concentrated without leases. “Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds, a Dominican employee of Paradise Management barked with the look of a Doberman Pincher. I stood there stunned by an offer that was better to the final solution of the previous Italian landlords. They had tried to fix the problems of an old building by splashing the rooftop with gasoline to collect on insurance money.

When I was a child, I carried Anne Frank while shadows of bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over us in The South Bronx of America. Mr. Mark, my white-haired English teacher who was what I had in the way of a grandfather figure, gave her to me to keep. This is my journal. This is an essay of images and a painting of words.

This is a mural for myself.

My life came to an end at The Hunt’s Point Public Library, a place of many endings and new beginnings. Once upon a time, I walked into the knowledge of good and evil where a dictator waved me over like a stranger in a car who said he knew my mother. I looked at the table to my right and saw my beloved Ann seduced me with her serene smile.

The end.

Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America.