Maureen Seaton

White people leave the express at 96th Street, collectively, like pigeons from a live wire or hope from the hearts of Harlem. And I’m one of them, although my lover sleeps two stops north between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards, wishing my ass were cupped inside her knees and belly, wishing this in a dream thick with inequalities. I live on Riverside Drive. My face helped get me here. I was ruddy with anticipation the day I interviewed for the rooms near the park with its snow-covered maples. I was full of undisguised hope as I strolled along the river, believing I belonged there, that my people inherited this wonderland unequivocally, as if they deserved it. My lover buys twinkies from the Arabs, bootleg tapes on ‘25 th , and carries a blade in her back pocket although her hands are the gentlest I’ve known. She ignores the piss smells on the corner, the sirens at 4 A.M., the men whose brains have dissolved in rum. And tries to trust a white woman who sleeps near the trees of Riverside. When we go out together, we avoid expensive cafés on Columbus Avenue, jaunts to the Upper East Side. Harlem eyes us suspiciously or with contempt beneath half-closed lids. We have friends there, hidden in the ruins like gold, who accept us. When it snows, we walk boldly anywhere, as if the snow were a protection, or a death.