Krypton Fell from Grace & Landed Somewhere in the Ghetto
I
Behind Building B12
a cherry tree resumes—
not miracle, exactly,
but near enough
to trouble the word.
No roots worth praising:
ruptured radiators,
bent syringes,
metal holding its cold.
Still it blooms—
pink moving hand to hand
between boys who learn early
how brief a body is.
It shouldn’t—
that’s the thought.
Then the correction:
since when did beauty
require clearance.
Its branches write the air
a loose script of insistence;
petals fall with no argument
beyond the falling.
Drones idle overhead,
small, precise,
mistaking attention
for suspicion.
They keep everything
which is not the same
as keeping faith.
Somewhere above that,
something like God reviews the footage—
not verdict, but revision—
lingering at the frame
just before the break,
as if there were still time
to choose otherwise.
II
At Miss Lula’s Chicken & Bitters
the glass holds.
Grease speaks in bursts.
The menu tilts, unchanged:
Tuesday—wings, a side of despair.
Wednesday—Kool-Aid, sugar pulled tight as scar.
Thursday—reparation tacos, three for ten,
no receipt, no clearing.
Outside, a boy lets out a laugh
too large for the moment—
not joy,
but proof.
An old man rocks a milk crate,
easing daylight toward dark.
No one says hope.
Still, something circulates—
passed without naming,
received without question.
III
Whatever fell here
did not announce itself.
Call it a green insistence
working up through asphalt,
something luminous
tuned to another atmosphere.
It broke down easy—
small enough to carry,
to portion into maybes:
this might take you back an hour,
this might return a voice
before it thinned to memory,
this might steady the breath
for one more stretch of day.
Some used it.
Some held it—
not belief, exactly,
but adjacent.
No one came flying.
Only men fluent in forms,
aligning loss in columns,
waiting for the block
to gather its evidence again.
A body becomes suspect
for bearing history too visibly,
for refusing the gesture
that makes others comfortable,
while helicopters press the sky
into a single, flattening noise.
IV
Meanwhile
the tree continues—
not unaware, not immune,
but committed
to its brief expenditure of color.
Petals enter where they can:
thresholds, shop floors,
the soft backs of a child’s heels,
even the small brass mouths
left behind in the street—
each one
briefly holding
a pink silence.
They resolve nothing.
Still,
the tree keeps spending
what cannot be saved.
====
There’s a Lot Wrong with the Cheesecake Factory
Of course that was her way
of deflecting.
Who among us
chooses revelation
over defense?
The seatbelt clicked—
that hush
before impact.
She said Cheesecake Factory
like it was a slur—
as if marinara were moral failure,
as if linguine
could insult lineage.
The algorithm caught the clip
and canonized her:
saint of self-worth,
saint of “he should’ve known.”
Comments did the rest:
verdicts in increments,
a chorus trained on outrage.
There was a time
when men brought flowers.
Now they bring
confirmation emails,
screens lit
like alibis.
Proof they tried.
A date is an interview
for a job
already filled.
Modern romance:
the man drives,
the woman films,
and the internet decides
who deserves mercy.
And somewhere
men turn to signal,
to distance,
to practiced indifference.
Women raise their glasses
to survival
until even grief
learns its angles.
We curate
what flatters,
refresh to see
who agrees.
Arriving on time
passes for romance.
And since when
did affection need
a Michelin rating—
The world insists:
be better,
but better performs,
tests clean,
leaves no trace.
We have optimized ourselves
into loneliness.
Apps and algorithms cool
like forgotten takeout
in the passenger seat
of something
that almost resembles love.
====
Author’s Note:
This poem was inspired by a viral video where a woman refused to get out of her date’s vehicle upon realizing their date was taking place at The Cheesecake Factory. The discourse that followed—felt less about one restaurant and more about what gets counted as “effort” in modern dating. The Cheesecake Factory became shorthand for a perceived gap between worthiness and gesture, tradition and image, romance and performance. The poem looks at how that gap is staged, judged, and replayed across feeds, and how easily a simple night out turns into content.
====
Image: DJ Benhaim
Image: Eugene Golovesov Unsplash remixed