GENTRIFIED
I drove down Lynch Street, in Old North Durham, where we
once lived. I don’t
taste the same air. Granny ain’t sittin’ dressed in
nude-pink rollers on the porch. I miss the whap of screened doors. A
whew it’s hot exhaled into flapping paper fans. Absent
were the granddaughters scoring
hopscotch along sidewalks
once traced down to the fingertips.
The jazz festivals all left. Even
the moaning lungs of the nomadic saxophone player
in the faded lavender suit/ once
on the corner of Main Street – has yet to return.
He won’t.
No jingle of ice cream truck in the scorch of summer or
$1.00 red, white & blue popsicles melting onto hands
licked clean as girls slap palms reciting east-side- west-side. The park
with our initials carved by pocketknife
on the trunk of the oaks as big as sky
is a Whole-Foods now.
And gone away are all the proclamations
of the boys we’d marry.
LS + MJ in a heart was the first spell I cast.
Catherine’s diner was cleared away. The checkered tile floor
where we danced and studied grownups
smoking paper-napkin cigarettes in our mimicking fingers
drinking Shirley Temples like vodka and whispering goddamn.
The crepe myrtle in the weeds where I
kissed Monte, is now handicap parking.
No more corner store for Gina and I
to strut to in jean shorts, with the guys who
loiter in a clowder, purring as we pass beneath
the neon sign flashing open.
No men standing in sloping front yards
echoing sports talk. No uncles with car-lot driveways to
gift us our first ride. Just – new money.
The fresh white paint over graffiti bleeds through
with the voices of artists now gone.
I drove down Lynch Street, scaled and gutted
like catfish hooked on a promise that growth would be
the answer to the struggle yet it was just worm on silver hook
pulling the present from its home and into hands that cut it open
and tossed it into flame. Sprinkling it in that copied flavor they wish
to embody.
But it does not taste the same.
Leah Jones was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. Growing up, she spent summers in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Outer Banks of N.C. She is a full-time military spouse, mother, and gardener. While moving about the east coast with her family, Leah spends majority of her time writing poetry. She won the 2019 Editors Choice award with ACHI Magazine for her novel Diving Horses.