Garden Apartments

Garden Apartments
Christopher Bogart

I’d always wondered why the called them
“garden apartments” There never seemed to be

A garden. No flowers. No vegetables. Just grass,
And a few bushes, surrounded by a fence of thick iron chain.

Sometimes there was a tree, double collared, and held to parallel posts,
Like some wild animal, restrained to avoid escape.

But those trees couldn’t escape. They were skinny and frail,
With barely any leaves. And no mind of their own.

I stared at them every day from the metal-encased window of my brand-new bedroom,
Deep within Pomonok Houses, a public housing project in Flushing, Queens.

Like chambers in a termite mound, each apartment was
Bound on all sides by apartments, each inhibited

By strangers with no faces, no names,
All trapped in metal, and glass and red brick

Lost in a maze of courtyards and streets,
In garden apartments with no gardens.


And I, like a sapling, contained within the bounds of iron chains,
Double collared to the marriage of my parents,

Bound to parallel posts, and secured to their red brick by the
Parallel walls. I, skinny and frail

With barely any leaves, and no mind
Of my own, grew where city streets contained

This garden of no named strangers whose brick-faced
Silence, like walls, rose up to block the sun.