Street Note:
Twenty-hundred Diamond
by Akin Osho Bosede

​Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia is building an expanded archive of cultural memory that includes multiple histories, re-place-ing the established with new narratives and understandings. Notes consider place via the street, sound, food, trees, and other portals.

Same location different dimension—a prose reference from a shade by the gate and on the road.

the way one perceives a line of travel stretched out before your eyes and a transient rooting for one’s walking strides has to do with when one fostered those memories of having walked that way

how one saw once upon an impression the lay of the land across the set of memory

the when and where of the circumstance

same location yet an obvious differentiation of generational perspective

take a look see at this for an example of notice on a say

a memorial on place long transferred into its own trans-morphing cadence of show

crossing roads of Diamond between 20th and 21st

reminiscent gestures of having seen there that which no longer exists

same place yet different dimension

my preadolescent eyes recall inside my decades on elder of a head

hawkers tailgating a sing on fruit, vegetable, fish first from horse-drawn conveyances

chickens for consequent table offerings staring out at us from wooden cages

later those same calls of chants floated off Oshun sweet tongues windowed from gas driven shorts

Ice man!!!

Got porgies, got sweet potatoes, greens and succulent melons!!!

ice man with his leather or burlap over shoulder

forceps rooted in the crystal shimmer of water fixed in freeze

horse waiting with blinders in place and bag of feed dropping loads for the street-sweep

eyes watching us in rapt observation stooped upon always washed down marble steps curious

we all awash with youthful inquisition

the experience of Time has its place named change

I remember the traveling funk of the 18 wheelers airing the hood with livestock on the way to some eastern slaughter passin’ through

and clothes lines on rolling pulls anchored across alleys from window to window

and poles holding lines for said breezing in yard after yard after yard

we played on the roofs of long gone brownstones one of which once I fell down going upstairs

same street now but different view