At Union Square Park

A buck isn’t enough for his cup, this ex-con
wants a five, yelling for every passerby to stop
and read his Rikers wristband.

Look hard. Harder, he demands as he points.
That’s me, and I can’t help but think of my uncle,
every time he got out of the slammer

and came home to the flat in the projects
he shared with my grandmother, how desperate he was
to go from room to room

as though he feared the few things
he cared about had all somehow disappeared
while he’d served his stretch.

He’d pick up a lamp, a frying pan, a vase
filled with plastic carnations, sniff at the stiff red petals devoid
of any sweetness, those everyday things

he’d never forgotten while doing time at Sing Sing,
Trenton, Rahway State, the top of the gray concrete strung
with a barbed triple strand guarded by

rifle-toting men I saw from the parking lot after
those long Sunday-afternoon drives with my family to bring
him a home-cooked meal on visiting days.

Uncle toggling a light switch, twisting open
the kitchen-window lock in the frigid dead of winter
and raising the panes that overlooked

the Erie Lackawanna cut, offering to help
solve the unanswered questions on the math worksheet
I’d brought home from school,

an eraser in his palm, then his pocket,
then back on the page, his quick hands rubbing away
any mistake he made.