After our Brooklyn apartment building is broken into, 2x

Sometimes you can see tenderness
in small moments on the New
York City train, like the stocky
boy who caressed the woman’s
back whose pinched face I believed
to be crying. Sometimes you can see
tenderness when the big buildings
hug the Brooklyn Bridge, yellow
lights warm, like the chrome seats
as we creak across the Manhattan.
Sometimes you feel tender
envisioning coming back to childhood
belongings, intact, waiting
in the position you kept
them in before your journey home.

Purvi Shah
“After our Brooklyn apartment building is broken into, 2x” is from Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006).