Unisex Baseball Tee (3/4 Sleeve): Audre Lorde #74

One day I slipped in the snowy gutter
     of Brighton Beach
and the booted feet passing
me by on the curb squished my laundry
     ticket
into the slush and I thought oh fuck it now
I'll never get my clean sheet and I cried
     bitter tears
into the snow under my cheek in that gutter
     in Brighton Beach
Brooklyn where I was living because it was
     cheap

—Audre Lorde, "Cables to Rage or I've Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time"

The great Audre Lorde didn't spend much time in Brooklyn, but the poem she wrote about her winter in Brighton Beach living with a racist "yente who sat all day long in our common kitchen / weeping because her children made her live with a schwartze" is one of the most unforgettable poems of our borough, featuring some of her most indelible lines:

I have been given other doses of truth—
that particular form of annihilation—
shot through by the cold eye of the way
     things are baby
and left for dead on a hundred streets of
     this city

We celebrate Audre Lorde with #74 to commemorate her “Cables to Rage or I’ve Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time,” one of the greatest poems of Brooklyn, published in her classic 1974 collection New York Head Shop and Museum.