after Baudelaire’s “Je n’ai pas oublié”

i.m. Jim Quinn, 1935–2020

I have not forgotten, neighbor,
our red brick rowhouse, tiny and quiet
with the window always cracked open
even in winter, and us rolling together
into the middle of the dented mattress,
a rooster in someone’s courtyard crowing
in the gray, lording it over his harem
of illegal chickens;