This place, too, has its own integrity:
split, ruined, abandoned
walls of chipped blue cursed
with black names, red dates, green rage
it stands here quiet in the cool salt taste of the morning.
Today the iron gates are open —
no need to belly under the rusted bars
pressing myself into dirt and weed
after a night of a thousand mirrors, taunting, humorless,
my mother in my hipbones shrieking, father my knees,
tomorrows of a grandfather who sailed out of humped Italian caves,
coarse inland dreams
to a country where he fathered twelve children and died
far from the streets he called home.