[Oye! This is an apartment building ode.]

Oye! This is an apartment building ode.
But not just any ode, an ode about breathing,
walking, jumping, running, skipping people.
An ode to a time where we’d remember what
odes felt like to read outside. An ode about
oding so hard it boxes itself into a sonnet.
Harder than bus stop benches and light rail
seats, taxes, and systemic poverty. The oding
of this poem is an apartment building sonnet
about people stacked up like bricks like words
in a sonnet. People that will tap your shoulder
to make sure you’re listening to the fact that this
poem is a token, a favor, a shirt off their back.
Oye! This is The Apartment Building Ode.
 

There’s Freestyle, Hip Hop, and Bachata on the steps
depending on the time of day we pick up groceries.
There are bikes by the curb and notebooks on those steps,
soda bottles, 2 quarter juices, and candy wrappers in bags.
There is a 10pm curfew for noise and the music plays
until 9:59, because the stoop DJ wakes up early too.
There are “No loitering on the stairs” signs in every hall-
way though it is understood that what we do isn’t aimless.
There is the smell of food, home-cooked or homemade,
plantains in C5, Hot Pockets in A3 and Chinese in the lobby.
There are lovers, soothsayers, tall-tale tellers, doers, hustlers,
potatoes, flowers, lighters, and so many hand gestures.
 
This is a concrete box that we call home.
There is a life we’ve learned to love and live.

Copyright © 2022 by Dimitri Reyes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I’m utterly enchanted by the use of performance art in public spaces and unity through storytelling. Oftentimes, I envision (and commit to) reading my Newark poems in the same places they were conceived, where I find that communal spaces, like apartment building steps, have the same energy that’s found in the many artistic spaces of New Jersey. This poem is a love letter to my people of ‘Brick City,’ my Newark that I choose to fill with joy, respect, and love. Where the many towering apartment buildings with their rows and rows of bricks can be seen from miles away.”
—Dimitri Reyes