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.
