step out to the balcony (under the pavement, pavement)

this morning the cranes delivered
a metallic finger the size of a schoolbus
outside of our apartment, pointing stubbornly
to the east, as though yearning for missing digits-

there’s hardly room as it is for our slender architecture
in these trenches of modernity, conversations of shins
clamoring up escalators to the skylight cataracts-

we sewed this city like an iron quilt,
speedbumps sang a harmonized collision
laying over medians of evergreens-

high-fenced promises of suburbs sprout like sunflowers,
as we wrap our calluses in sunday papers
displaying names of budding skeletons,
and miscarriages of abandoned construction sites-

we’re governing a state of reconstruction,
paving one-way streets around the artery,
scaling fire escapes of our blushing facades
and squatting over pyramids of spare parts-