Brown   On New York City streets the smells are brown in summer — diesel exhaust, cooking grease, putrefaction, too many people. Brown noise: taxis, bus brakes, jackhammers, police sirens. The hazy humid air is brown. The sun’s a molten penny, oozing light that diffuses into simmering brown. The asphalt liquefies, turns brown. And night’s as brown as day — dank, suffocating, brown. You feel like you’ve been dipped in tar and rolled in a dungheap of brown soot, brown grime, brown grit, brown dung. The fusty clatter of old subway tunnels — brown. But I love how brown skin looks so good in summer, how it glows in tropical clothes, crazy turbans. Brown eyes gleam like Puerto Rico, shine like snow.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont June 2011