My first thought would be to tell you the things I see when I am 

the corner of the street with its red lights, 

and all those dogs and crooked bus-stop signs. 

How I breath the glass and ringing alarms the folded arms of people 

in upstairs windows. 

how I am all of them waiting.

I would tell you how I was the kid who wandered around people’s small

apartments, museums of glass bottles from department stores and dancing

figurines collecting dust around the skirt, and deep

into the eyes.

How I would punch holes into the dusty air with skinny, impatient fingers

and how no one would listen to all that went on right outside

their own open spaces, how the random scent of Russian cooking mixed

with our own.

How no one was left from our old country.

I would see the loose-fitting flowered house dress as it plodded across

the living room to show you something you saw before in every lost,

black, dream you must have had when you were younger.

How I imagine the small life you broke into pieces with your brothers 

as she shuffles those photographs from deep in her shoe-box.

There crumbs in the corners, book marks and fingerprints like

she sat down many times with her life assembled here, on the corner

of her bed perhaps, maybe like this,

on a Sunday.