The tree leaves gleam in the sun,

Water runs down their sloped spines.

They have retaken the land,
Smothered the brick, the abject concrete.

My cranium sways back, forth
The car my rocking mother.

And the desert playgrounds past,
Ambitious towers that lie defeated in the shadow of penitentiaries.

My breath ebbs and wraps around the river
Cloaked in pond scum and pollutants.

I’m passing the zoo,
Where grandmother beats herself in the heat.

The weeds are dead among battered rocks,
The copper filaments cling to the tracks

And the murals’ pigments are chipping away
And trees will soon conquer the overpass.

The city looms like an unbroken promise,
And I breathe in, deep.

Back to the aluminum, glass mammoths
Onto another, another day.