Homeless On Jensen, Avoiding Easy Money (2023)
9111 Jensen Dr, Houston, TX 77093
by Farrah Fang
Part 2 of 3

Every street you walk is bred for the likes of long legs and mesh

From Airline to this part of Jensen, your body is the center of the Northside

The call of the night can only be ignored for so long, when it's pulsing and quaking

Puncturing your orifices, your piercing breasts singing pop songs in a crop top

Despite your attempted resignation, knowing you’ll turn into more than salt if you turn back

The dangers encountered spiral from honking cars, circling the street, its own land mass

The labors endured slipped beneath their hands, green and miniscule to your honor

The season is that of the lost, Texan summer is merely the metaphor for damnation

Your days spent sleeping on concrete and broken glass, the rubble of buildings burned

Whispers that real estate moguls set Jensen Square on fire to purchase the property for cheap

The Northside gentrified in the face of the houseless and hungry, slowly but surely

You trek from Alma Latina to Tidwell to use the McDonald’s restroom to bathe

Dante was safer with Virgil than you with your body, even dirty and slimy, you are on the menu

Hiding behind corners and signs, avoiding the fiends of the street ready to pounce

Are you the heroine of your own story or the cautionary tale of the neighborhood

Passed by ghostly faces who feel better about their lives knowing they are not you

The irony that you wrote an essay about this life, got paid to read it at an art show

For the ears of peers, creatives, wealthy pockets who know not of Northside cruelty

Only to return to the streets you mused over, warned them about, can never escape

Spending your stipend on tiny bottles of whiskey and new hair, your safe spaces

Blessed to make it from one end to the other, without succumbing to the will of men