poem
Volume 32, Number 3

Getting Ready for the Grand Reopening

The site supervisor sighs. 

He can’t decide what will be the heaviest. The concrete barricades? The flowers upon flowers? Rusted carnations with feathered fringes as crisp and flaky as a burnt pastry? A lone lily drooping like a mute swan? Fresh orchids, purple and delicate, each blossom like a barely opened, shaded eyelid? The framed photographs-the oil painting-even the chalk art portrait of George Floyd near the spot where there had once been a chalk outline of his dead body? 

Everything must go. It’s been a year, and the mostly white neighborhood has been having to drive south four blocks to 42nd or north two blocks to 36th.


—Jeff Isaacson