Invocation

Kingsessing in Southwest Philadelphia is a low country of porches and brick. A long green edge where Cobbs Creek keeps the seasons and the city sets its weight down. It is trolley bells and bus sighs, damp cellar air, snow that turns the street into a white ledger and summer that writes itself in hydrants. It is rowhouse cornices and hand-painted signs and the iron geometry of fire escapes. It is the smell of bread at dawn and hot brake pads at noon and rain lifting the dust off asphalt in the evening. Kingsessing is corner glass and barber mirrors, a library cool as a sanctuary, a ball thudding on varnished wood, a church basement that knows fifty recipes for mercy. It is stoops—the first step, the second step, the last—with chairs set out like commandments and gossip folded small as a prayer. It is aunties with sun hats and boys with scabbed knees and girls with jump ropes thwacking time. It is names printed on envelopes and on shirts and on the backs of jerseys, and it is the other names, the ones you earn: Ms., Coach, Cuz, Deacon, Nurse. It is the slow code of nods on a morning sidewalk. It is the place under the El where the pigeons keep their own parliament. It is a crossing guard’s raised palm and a bus kneeling and a driver who waits longer than he has to. Kingsessing is a rulebook and a rumor and a promise made on the corner; it is a notice taped to a door and a hand that takes the tape down. It is rent due, and it is someone sliding an envelope across a table, and it is thanks left like change on the table. It is the long light on Baltimore Avenue and the straight run of 52nd where commerce speaks in neon, with half the letters missing. And Kingsessing is its people, which is to say it is the sound they make together when a siren passes and no one you love is in it. It is the patience at a red light when the street is empty. It is the small work of keeping: a sweep, a saltshaker, a knock, a name. It is a neighborhood that outlasts its weather, and it is the weather that teaches the neighborhood how.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

When the Veil is Open

Before the web, there was the web of connection, no endless moving trains of news, global distractions, or any sounds all day and night. I remember the silent wind with my mate at age nine on bicycles along Suffolk roads between house paths, on country tractor paths, mooing at dairy cows we passed. I looped a plastic sack around handlebars with two potato-crisp sandwiches, prawn cocktail flavour, crushed well between caked-bread slices, with a Cadbury Flake for afters. I didn’t know what a spirit was, a duppy, or any spirit at Salvation Army or Cub Scout meetings, as I do now. Wondering if King Solomon did enough to imprison the demons and gins. In a house, a darkened room packed with friends and family, dutty-wine-dancing, filled with gin and rum, while us kids were distant, checked in and out of the coat room. Did the lovers rock, heavy reggae bass-tones, the grown-folk groove, tear the veil as Gnawa Guembri to those beyond? If I discerned enough—could I see wandering duppies bring us closer, tighter as the drink-mix loosened bones within. Each soul here, hips and groin, gyrated with deep-dropping bass and drumbeats, dripping skin with sweat. Bodies open and release in the beguiled state, my breath empty. I wonder which crows or blackbirds were watching us back then, hidden in the darkness beyond our windows or in the morning blazing sun. Ancestors on power wires, brick pub corners, or the magpies in my yard, presently watching me as I see them. Ancestors appear more in the Spring, collecting souls, bargaining lost hope broken-glass with the gins, not during the stale-tree stick-life loneliness of Winter. Maybe that’s why there is so much silence in the palatinate forest, before buds open, sails of swishing leaves begin, before the woodpecker is pecking a new home, or releasing Morse code warning to those awakening in their seasonal rebirth. This woodland place where webs were frosted statues, thawing out their connection to each beech tree, oak tree, without the noise humans created, recalling the stillness where we once played, where we once began.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.