Mrs. Báez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor
 

It hunches

with a brittle black spine

where they poured

gasoline on the stairs

and the bannister

and burnt it.

 

The fire went running

down the steps,

a naked lunatic,

calling the names

of the neighbors,

cackling in the hall.

 

The immigrants

ate terror with their hands

and prayed to Catholic statues

as the fire company

pumped a million gallons in

and burst the roof,

as an old man

on the top floor

with no name known

to authorities

strangled on the smoke

and stopped breathing.

 

Some of the people left.

There's a room on the third floor:

high-heeled shoes kicked off,

a broken dresser,

the saint's portrait

hanging where it looked on

shrugging shoulders for years,

soot, trash, burnt tile,

a perfect black light bulb

to remember everything.

 

And some stayed. The old men

barechested, squatting

on the milk crates to play dominoes

in the front-stoop sun;

the younger ones, the tigres,

watching the block with unemployed faces

bitter as bad liquor;

Mrs. Báez, who serves coffee

on the third floor

from tiny porcelain cups,

insisting that we stay;

the children who live

between narrow kitchens

and charred metal doors

and laugh anyway;

the skinny man, the one

just arrived from Santo Domingo,

who cannot read or write,

with no hot water

for six weeks,

telling us in the hallway

that the landlord set the fire

and everyone knows it,

the building's worth more empty.

 

The street organizer said it:

burn the building out,

blacken an old Dominicano's lungs

and sell

so that the money-people

can renovate

and live here

where an old Dominicano died,

over the objections

of his choking spirit.

 

But some have stayed.

Stayed for the malicious winter,

stayed frightened of the white man who comes

to collect rent

and borrowing from cousins

to pay it,

stayed waiting for the next fire,

and the siren,

hysterical and late.

 

Someone poured gasoline

on the steps outside her door,

but Mrs. Báez

still serves coffee

in porcelain cups

to strangers,

coffee the color

of a young girl's skin

in Santo Domingo.

from The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero

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