Will you meet me where the spirits meet? Where they dance in summer’s casket? They have opened the street to footsteps and I’ve disassembled the before and after. People on top of trash on top of people on top of trash.
            I have prayed to you before, Santa Rosalia, here on this Brooklyn boulevard. I’ve walked the yellow lines; my hands wrapped tight, my lips whispering entreaties. Am I the only one who knows you’re the reason we’re all here? The gutters are lined with thick, white trucks. The rooftops are the bleachers. Powdered zeppole sugar floats on air and the teenagers are on the hunt. The crowd is twisting and jolting like an animal confused.  I’m rowing through a fluorescent tunnel of glittered limbs and too-tight fabrics. Viewed from above we are a boiling valley of drip-drop bomb pops on the move. Will you find me here among the games, between the barks of cons? Will I find you here, alone perhaps, in a slow march flirt towards the dark?
            I’ll stray with you, if you ask, to the mysterious safety of the side street. To the liquid quiet of stoop-front Brooklyn. We’ll pass the families on stone steps, murmuring in the dark, watching the drifters shuffle from the show. Cigarette and cigar circles burn red in the shadows behind the fences as wayward sprinklers tap wet fingers across our ankles. We’ll walk over smeared chalk hopscotch and pass the pop pop of Spaldeens kissing crumbling schoolyard walls. The lofty, elevated subway tracks will be our mountains and our markers in the distance.
            We can slip off through the labyrinth of slender alleys to the hidden backyards. Past the tool sheds and their rooftop, Wiffle ball graveyards. The children will be swimming in aboveground six-foot circle pools, banking

‘Marco!’
                                    ……….
                                                                        ‘Polo!’

off the carbon sky. We’ll hop metal fences and lie beneath a canopy of sycamores and a hailstorm of fireflies strobing the boxed-in nature. Lets dig bare hands beneath the dirt, below the stone and urban myth, past the scully boards, flipped Topps and doo wop soil. Below the Dutch farmland and the fossils. If we dig deep enough, hard enough, climbing down through the County of Kings, we just might find ourselves tonight.
            I come to you one last time, my dear Santa Rosalia. You saved Palermo from the plague in 17th century Italy. Can you rescue my own faith from plagues of fear and doubt? I offer you my pocket green via elders with antique accents. Labor Day patiently waits with a guillotine smirk. I’ll walk along this black spine, dressed in vivid shades, until the final day.

One last time.

At least until next year.