"adidas (All Day I Dream About Sex): A Triptych"

by Carlo Baldi

I. Like Warm Milk

where are you william the stocky
puerto rican jehovah’s witness from
161st street in seventh grade how we
used to practice long jumping under
fire escapes and across the street in
the little park where the conga players
softened sunsets into evenings while
lightning bugs flashed and how you’d
sometimes read from the hardcover
orange book of being a good young
christian teen as we sat on the stoops
facing the bridge overpass eating
sunflower seeds for hours before we
would talk for hours about jerking
off for hours and the day you told me so
scientific almost like quoting a book
that you had shot your first load and
how it really did look like warm milk

II. Behind Yankee Stadium

behind yankee stadium
where the old men played
shuffleboard in ritual silence
past the underpass beyond
the handball courts and the
toilet-bowl where we played
baseball and caught bees in
bottles one day i found among
the bushes these books of dirty
stories and a bunch of porno
magazines in english and in
spanish and from then on no
patch of green no bush no rock
no city park would go unnoticed

III. Surprise Bodega Tanktop

thinking a lot about angelo the grocer
and his old stuttering wife wondering if
they’re still there my first bodega in the
bronx down at the bottom of the hill at
the end of the park facing my building
angelo’s bodega filled with music and
endless candy juicy fruit gum and purple
welches orange sunkist soda malta el sol
and mary janes italian ices charleston
chews we’d freeze and snap and break
my bodega smelling of plátanos yuca
and moist earth that late afternoon at the
counter a lovely slim and sexy boricua
lady with blue eyes short brown hair in
summertime was buying soda cigarette
in hand and a tanktop showing cleavage
where i gazed to find surprise surprise
that she had chest-hairs long and blond

Carlo Baldi is a poet, visual artist, and community educator. Born in Costa Rica, he came to the Bronx when he was nine. His work has been published in The New York Times, Urban Latino, A Gathering of the Tribes, and various on-line journals. He has performed widely for over 15 years as a spoken word artist, including features at The Knitting Factory, The Nuyorican, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, The Point, BAAD, La Peña del Bronx, Word Up!, Realness and Rhythms, The Audre Lorde Project, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, The Uptown Arts Stroll, BAM, MoMA, LaMama, NYU, The New School, WHCR, WBAI, and many others. He curated the uptown performance series “Uptown Poets Ink.” and “Jammin’ at the Cloisters.” He lives and works in New York City.