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By David Breitkopf
The neighborhood had changed over the years.
Once a blood dot on a map,
a red asterisk to Manhattan,
a syringe of violence shot in the eye,
it took the A train in a hurry,
past Mother Cabrini in her glass sarcophagus,
past the Armory’s red brick bulwark
past the Audubon Ballroom
where X was equal to and greater than death’s waltz.
Today the med students enter there to buy textbooks
without a sigh of regret.
Even the air has changed its tune
whipping around Port Authority
and twisting off an oversized Yankee cap
from a boy’s short cropped cabeza,
drifting it above the Fort Washington traffic, up
up it twirls, scaling the bridge’s pylons, now dipping,
mimicking the cables’ parabolas.
Yes, the holidays would never be the same again.
David Breitkopf lives in Washington Heights and has been a journalist for many years. He presently teaches tennis. His fiction and poetry have been published online at Metazen, The Cynic, and the Cartier Street Review, among other publications. “The Heights” was originally selected by the Above the Bridge writers group for inclusion in its monthly reading series in Washington Heights.
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