The barista plays banjo behind the bar
and says, “She’s not there. She never was.”
A girl in Red Hook swears she found her
in a scratched CD at a stoop sale.
Cicadas buzz through a Bushwick dusk.
Somewhere, a harp plucks memory
from the marrow of a brownstone’s bones—
not streaming, just echoing.
We gather in small rooms
with warped vinyl and wine,
singing misheard lyrics like prayers
to a voice too wild to be compressed.