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| Photo: Kevin Bubriski, World Trade Center Series, New York City, 2001, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Consolidated Natural Gas Company Foundation, 2003.65.1, © 2001, Kevin Bubriski |
~for Nolbert
Your sanctuary hasn't been touched
in over twenty years.
Hair intertwined with bristles
resting on the bathroom windowsill
next to the porcupine plant.
The shower still smells of Irish
Spring soap bathing your body.
You thought you would be late to protect
two sky scrapers.
Blue striped sheets pushed aside
on your futon fitted your body each night.
That September
morning, running late you grabbed
a pair of un-matching socks.
One grey sock hid from you under your bed.
You looked confident
in your grey uniform,
deep pockets for hiding notes,
ready to stop crime in the towers.
Today, I peek outside the oval bedroom window
seeing the view of early Autumn that you had
that last morning. Leaves beginning to change
colors, red, yellow, violet, hugging branches
before they fell in the yard.
Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet, educator and facilitator of poetry for healing and self-expression. Her new book of prose poems is titled Coral in the Diaspora published by Abode Press (August 2024). Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Artemis Journal, Urthona Buddhism and Art Magazine, The Dewdrop, Shambhala Times, The Yale Review, Wax Poetry & Art, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Mantis, Penumbra Literary & Art Journal, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, Silver Birch Press, and many others. Her collaborative songwriting and poetry are featured on the Grammy-nominated album Many Hands Family Music for Haïti.