What was I doing at fifteen?
Face down on the pavement,
nostrils tinged with bullet-smoke,
the brick-dust falling around
us like fresh snow or white
chalk, I watched the kid stalking
the sidewalk. It was summer
in Brooklyn. Nothing ever happens
until it happens. That’s how my brother
and sister-in-law described their tours
at war after our dinner in Manhattan.
Assuming we were a world away from
Iraq, we decided it was a good idea
to take a shortcut through Sumner
projects, until we heard the sound
that tore through the story I was telling
about a lunchtime fight on the blacktop
of my high school, a sudden flash
of lightning: no one believed it
was happening. They forgot their army
training, rubber-necked towards
the source of the thunder. And then we
tumbled behind the parked cars.
Waited. For what, we were not sure.
Between the cars, I could only make
out his narrow back and the dark
steel clutched in his small hand.
I needed to see his face, half expecting
to see my own. We are all the shooter.
We stand on the corner aiming at something
that is never quite there.
Carlos Andrés Gómez is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College. Winner of the 2015 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in the North American Review, Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Muzzle, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTV Books, 2012), and elsewhere.
