A’ishah Cerrato

Block Party

​Sliding down a salivated tongue
his chocolate hands shatter the algebraic bricks
scratching Donna Summer’s mezzo soprano honey.
Silently, she swings her hips into the humid air
of b-boy breaking it down on painted gravel.
The turntable’s needle conducts the operations,
meshing and interloping between digits,
switching the beats and tempos to accelerando.

Decimals and fractions borrow her band’s voice.
With no notes needed they lace together
a channel to only one conditional solution.
Grandmaster Flash slips in inverse addition to a mashup,
as those legs in tight ripped jeans flex
and stand on built arms across the dance floor,
pumped by those sounds passed around so generously.

That’s the key, the magical melodies scripted
into the grooves of his fingerprints.
Isolate the variable.
Simple and complex, the chord progression,
that’s the rhythm, a linear equation.
The root. The value of music.




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A’ishah Cerrato is a student at Miami Arts Charter in the Creative Writing Program. He has been published in two anthologies and has been awarded two gold keys and a silver key in Scholastics. He also enjoys reading and writing prose and poetry.