Fuck a dollar and a dream.
—Biggie Smalls
When I can’t sleep I go
up to the rooftop
of my apartment building
and watch the man who sleeps
on the bus stop bench
across the street, brown by birth
or sun. I want to ask him
How do you do it?
From here I can see a lottery
jackpot billboard off the highway
mid-update, so that it currently reads
WIN 0 MILLION.
I was born in the city
that never sleeps so perhaps
insomnia is my birthright.
Even in Miami, the New York
air must have stuck to the inside
of my lungs like cigarette tar,
directing my luck towards
noise and lights. Sometimes
it’s the cops who always
pull people over in front
of my apartment at every hour
with their howling sirens,
sometimes it’s the jet planes
across the street, rattling
my windows with takeoff,
their over-caffeinated pilots
dreaming of sleep too.
Sometimes it’s the stack
of mail on my nightstand
from the doctor’s office,
credit card companies, Sallie
Mae, the IRS, all unopened,
collecting dust instead
of collecting from me.
The things that weigh me down
must have pressed me into sleep
right on the rooftop because I wake
to sparrows hopping about
my head, the highway singing
its blues of passing traffic.
The sun hangs in the sky
out of reach, revealing
the unfamiliar faces
at the bus stop, how much
the lottery is now, how late
I am for work.
Ariel Francisco is a Dominican-Guatemalan-American poet born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in Florida. He is currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is also the assistant editor of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine. His poems have appeared in The Boiler Journal, Portland Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere.