ABSTRACT
As a teenage girl growing up in New York, I wrote many poems. I wrote while staring at the moon from the bedroom in Queens that I shared with my younger brother. I had a pretty good view of the moon – our apartment was on the ninth floor of a brick building whose elevator only stopped on odd-numbered floors. We were immigrants from Cuba and my father told us that we ought to feel lucky to live on an odd-numbered floor. If you were a tenant living on an evennumbered floor, you had to get off a floor above or a floor below and take the creepy, hidden stairs either up or down to your apartment.
