A Fire in Brooklyn
Alan Semerdjian
There's a motionless waterbug
on the back of my girlfriend's floor.
It's been there for days.
It must have been there when the fire broke out
in the basement of the corner shop
on Hoyt Street. We saw it
coming home.
The slow scream of lights
replaced the sirens, the firetrucks
parked in alarm.
All this under a clothesline of those
crayon colored triangles that
hang like shark's teeth over
used car lots and across projects.
The smoke coughed out the faces-
one, darkened and disinterested,
the other, mobile.
She forgot the name of her student
that surfaced on
the other side of the street
carrying a brown bag of liquid
to put the fire out.
It came to her later:
Sharief, she said,
Sharief is his name.
