Walking on the Lower East Side

I’m the life-sized rag doll strapped to my master’s shoes dancing salsa in subway. I’m naked in camouflage paint as a minor detail in a mural of Selena. I’m a brick from the former 5th street squat, I’m a flatten cobblestone you can’t see cuz of the tro’m poile. Look at me, I’m a white puffy cloud, and now I’m the letters of smoke from a skywriting plane. (Feb. 8-01)

Brenda, Remember your transformation into a public character and your plans to enter public space. Your design is to sell whatever the street yields, the valuables and to buy stories. 

Old Man Yearby, my grandpa, was a public character in his own grocery store with coal stove, big brass cash register and glass candy case. Inside were bon bons, horehound candy shaped like bacon strips, stick candy in a jar. He spent afternoons in a lawn chair by the meat case, cutting bologna, making onion salad in cup and swatting flies. His dog was public too. Minnie Yearby, who wore glasses, sat upright, smoked cigars, and made change. 

My whole tribe/nation of my mother’s side, my grandpa and uncles were all public (politicians) characters. They named our village after us, Yearbyville. You could just say your name and “put it on credit.” You could just say, “I’m a Yearby” and be on your way. 
Then my parents had a country store, the Midway Market, and we went by my father’s name, we were the public Coultas’s living in full view of the school bus, doing homework and drinking pop in lawn chairs in our place of business. 

I thought marriage would be my most public act and performance or my baptism or once when I taken an oath to defend the public or when I was a girl scout pledging to do my best to honor God and my country, and once when I was in the newspaper because I was a welder and a fashion model, and then I got stalked, and once when they used to call me Puffy Coultas.