The city draws its line along an edge
marked the usual way: asphalt & park
cheap rents & mortgages, trick & treat;
Nothing hallowed when the children cross
not looking both sides, simply marching
on the places where adults sweeten the deal
made by the people for the people but not them
not their parents who swarm in equal numbers
part time mother, part time hired hand,
ham hock life neither here nor there
upending on decaying beds, this peat moss
of society and structure solely meant
to maintain an order ever bent to others’ gain;
Over their shoulder the story of numbers:
6 libraries, population 57,825,22 mil to renovate &
Across the street 1.533 mil people sharing
61 rooms with books, more than a deck dealt
raw and blank, those rooms shut for lack
of a thing called money unexpectedly—
Their peers engage in service and cross
in turn. They’d read of the savageries of inequality,
decades on, that was old news, surely
Kozol was dead wrong, nowadays it didn’t apply
but see: the one computer covered in rat turd
the teacher wipes each morning, metal bar,
detention, wipe-out, the blue five-oh patrolling
and here, the best of the least served applies
and is welcomed into the house they call ABC
the one that gives him A Better Chance here
where all 2,667 scholars get the Mac for free
for doing nothing but for an address on the right side,
this one, where the lawyers advocate
the doctors fix, & the professors analyze
what has gone wrong with everything,
where each school is stacked in their favor:
art and music to sustain, sports to relieve,
& counselors for every twist in the journey—
Why begrudge the bicycle stolen then, the one
the lone boy rides, his legs too long for it,
pedaling furiously away as far as he can get
from the green lawns and washed cars,
the scent of union in the air, this vast landscape
of untenable earnings, the justifiable fears
of waking from an American fantasy of arrival
in places that require defense, let him go.
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of the short-story collection, Sleeping Alone (2022), and the forthcoming essay collection, Bon Courage (2023) and the novels A Disobedient Girl (2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a New York Times Editor's Choice Book. She is the editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015) and co-editor of Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security (2018). She writes for the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. She is a winner of the Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the JH Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing in the US and abroad, and is the Director of the Artists Network at Narrative 4.
Photo by Ru Freeman