J.D. Isip
Carmelitos Ever After
Every night, every time the bank account is empty,
it calls to me, its many voices who lived and died there
in the cold concrete tombs, lined with the finest
layaway treasures of Welfare Queens and Ghetto Kings
forever fanning themselves on the porch
calling innumerable children
back to the fold
Can you believe anyone ever wanted to live in the projects?
It broke ground in 1939, fifty acres, 67 buildings
with thick cement walls in case Long Beach became
the next Pearl Harbor which never happened
but we sent our Japanese to the camps anyway.
Come home, little children! Come home! The chorus:
Mother May Bell Moses, selling Styrofoam cups of frozen
Kool-Aid, her twin girls glaring down at you if you ain’t
got a dime you ain’t gonna get what they have, a drink
in the SoCal sun, a line of barefoot hoodrats
bouncing from foot to foot, double-dutching
in place, still there, Come home!
Carmelitos Housing Development—lovers of the poor—
offered mostly black families, and us,
shelter with indoor toilets and bathtubs
hard-won luxuries lauded by the NAACP as a win
for poor souls looking for a better life
I dream myself the first ghetto mutant, a telekinetic, able
to burn it all down, hands outstretched blasting those walls
lifting the May Twins into the stratosphere, creating a vortex
to swallow the hood up whole, every last dealer, boombox,
the bread man selling diabetes pies for twice their worth,
“This is not the promised land!” I say, every time I wake up
and find it part of me.
—Submitted on 04/30/2020
J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.
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