The Moon Shatters

		The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue A wooden box rattled with coins for the family, on a stoop where the roots of a brown bloodstain grew. Brooklyn, 1966: Agropino Bonillo was his name, a neighbor, the yellow leaflet said, a kitchen worker who walked home under the scaffolding of trains at night, hurrying past streetlamps with dark eyes. He was there when the boys surrounded him, quick with shouts and pushing, addiction's hunger in a circle. When he had no money, the kicking began. The mourners clustered at the storefront, then marched between cadaverous buildings down Alabama Avenue, as the night turned blue with rain in a heavy sky of elevated track. The first candles struggled, smothered wet; onlookers leaned warily as they watched. A community of faces gathered and murmured in the dim circles of light, kept alive by cupped hands. In the asphalt street shined black from rain and windows where no one was seen hesitant candles appeared, a pale blur started on the second floor, another trembling glimmer slipped to the back of the march, then more, multiplied into a constellation spreading over the sidewalk, a swarm of candles that throbbed descending tenement steps in the no longer absolute dark, as if the moon had shattered and dropped in burning white pieces on the night. His name was Agropino Bonillo, spoken remembering every sixty dollar week he was bent in the kitchen, his children who could not dress for winter and brawled against welfare taunts at the schoolyard, the unlit night that the sweep of legs was stopped by his belly and his head. And the grief of thousands illuminated city blocks, moving with the tired feet of the poor: candles a reminder of the wakes too many and too soon, the frustrated prayers and pleading with saints, in memoriam for generations of sacrificed blood warm as the wax sticking to their fingers, and years of broken streetlamps, bowed with dark eyes, where addiction's hunger waits nervously. Over the wooden box, a woman's face was slick in a drizzle of tears. Her hand dropped coins like seed. from Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction