Soul Medicine

Barbeque and corn bread and greens made by black hands.  Adobo and rice eaten with thick brown fingers.  A handwritten love note with a #2 pencil.  A street sax blowing colors across the sky.  Tortillas and rice and beans and abuelitas' voices rising through rooftops.  Murals on our skin, wet with our stories, our lives, our revolution.  Palleteros pushing cool cool cool flavors that paint the tongue a picture of community, finger painted portraits of our dreams.  Grandpa with a wrinkled racing form, transistor radio broadcasting voices of spirits dancing, splashing like flowers in the throats of babies.  Wrinkled photos and longhand notes written illegibly legible on the palm lines of leaves.  A belly full of pork noodle soup.  Familiar faces on Frisco streets.  Terry on the corner of 7th St selling slow jam CD's--Delfonics, Isley Brothers, Dramatics.  Nella planting collard greens and kale and everything that is good, her brown Filipino hands offering her gifts from the soil in the Tenderloin.  Stories written in Russian rye bread.  Rice noodles whipping around block after block of the TL, Dreams fermenting on the corner of Turk and Larkin.  Black voices that never die.  Samoan church food passed from hand to hand, elder to child, heart to heart.  Sacks filled with Chinese vegetables. Fish eyes looking through tanks as rivers flow down Chinatown streets.  My grandmother's cane that kept our unstable world stable as she walked to and from St. Patricks Church on Mission.  Mission Street palm trees that tell us home isn't too far and can be heard in the conga drum that dreams of freedom from the pawn shop.  Fog horns moanin' wetness as the sun breaks though for the first time over and over again in my city.