Mixtape for the Corner Saints

We pass Sundays like loose change,
folded into the thin seams of our pockets,
prayers tucked behind receipts, behind the grocery list,
behind the photograph of a boy in a blue cap
smiling like he knows the future owes him nothing.
Mama light burns like a fridge bulb in the doorway,
the porch is witness—two chairs, one radio,
neighbors trading gossip like rare records,
spinning faith and hard candy into the night.

Listen: the block is a hymn with sirens for cymbals,
church bells replaced by the clack of high heels
and the soft rain of a man selling lottery dreams.
We baptize our children in the steam of stew,
wash sins with hot coffee, the kind that stains tongues
and keeps conversations honest until noon.
Old men sit like prophets, elbowing time,
telling stories about a war only they remember,
about a love that survived on pennies and prayer.

We got poets who paint in aerosol confessions,
girls with braids long enough to sweep the past away,
boys who learn to dance before they learn to speak,
keeping rhythm with a heartbeat that's been rehearsed
for seven generations of getting up after getting up.
There is grief here—thick as winter—folded into laughter,
because we hustle joy like contraband, hide it in the seams
so the world won't see how soft we are beneath the armor.

Some nights the moon leans low, like a judge listening,
and we lay our mistakes on the stoop like used clothes,
hoping the dawn will wash them thin. Some nights we pray
with a cussing kind of reverence, naming what hurt us,
naming who taught us to be small and who taught us to rise.
Love is loud: a horn from a borrowed Cadillac,
the lullaby of hammers, the whisper of a lover's hand.
We keep living like a mixtape—side A, side B—repeats and skits,
skipping tracks, sometimes skipping beats, always finding the chorus.

So if you walk past this corner, lean in.
Hear the church without steeple, the gospel without pulpits,
the people who grind and sing and forgive themselves
for being human in a city that forgets how to kneel.
We are corner saints—no saints' halos, just streetlight halos—
learning holy in the small things: a slice of pie, a stop for a friend,
the way we say each other's names like a charm, like a promise.