Attractions by John Allman

 

DRUMS

Uptown, across the river, police are gathering for the black youth march. Uptown: barricade pens, cattle chutes, the shimmer of helmets. Uptown, there is too much debt. But in Brooklyn, dreadlocked and tall, he bends over a shimmering steel skin doing Joo-VAY and the pings of Trinidad shimmer down Nostrand Avenue. Corn soup, roti, sorrel-scented beer, lost jobs, lost wives, pursuit and odor of a perfect pitch. Take this to a village on the Black Sea, take this to Golcuk’s earthquake, take this to the anchovy casserole lying in the rubble, take this to the ferry from Istanbul arriving to take families away, take this to the open fissures of a land. Take tamboo bamboo, biscuit tins, bottles, scrap-iron-struck triangles vibrating prayer from Brooklyn and be joy.