Breath Gradients, Block by Block
for Laura Jaramillo
And I ride, what do I ride
I fall back dreaming
J & C of being able—
intravenous snow, uncapillaried whosever—
to choose to live an easy walk
from you but all the money flushes
nowhere through there, touching
the bus, the snow, a place you cannot go
/
I love and fuck and hate in Buffalo
that is not Buffalo, though
for a moment, when we are at Fitz’s
or rolling dice as J leans against Violet’s flank
it seems we might if the room
were a mask of petals our
pleasure turned inside out
/
overdosed and on political fire
a snow plough foundering faced
with this rate of accumulation
could be knowing almost most kids
suffer from lack and love every
sound of them playing on the street
which love does nothing but pebble
the screen before the blade’s
swipe I used to like
seeing people park at the foot
of Ferry to smoke and watch the river
change and not, now
I am that person, guarding
a rainless June on the Skyway
tracing a black geyser of smoke down
a home burns to join the drift
of Canada burning, minus one shelter
where are you?
/
waking under the 198 pylons
thaumatrope of graffiti, Scajaquada Creek’s
drought-bare banks who makes
atmospheres to throttle ease
from public being below
the combustion C brings a
hacking stray in for a chest x-ray
pylon says ARM TRANS PEOPLE
/
not looking for you, a ripple
in a small, sweaty room, smoke
pours into rivers, the watershed—
of drywall, asphalt shingles, palm-print
of homes over this home-bare city,
into the river, the empire of time
& dialectics of the mask H pulls
a flexible length of silver from the inner
hank of their thigh, arranges those lengths
into a transit map connecting
each node in which they gave
received care red blob
on the AQ map whole burning provinces
enormous suppurating sore
the smoke-river empties
into Lake Ontario the bottle woman, the mail person
J, still out there, the week
rent checks flock
rainless, bright
/
I wake in a sling, hefting
my nugget to the burning chandelier
of our water supply if care travels
how will we count it?
webs of getting by, trains carrying
old joy, distros of filters
where are you? opening the clasp
of what we’ve made to
remake and die in the sanctum
of that, which could be
life-strewn streets or was it
a car, frozen by the blizzard
half block from your house
the night the city, as a capacitor of care
died
/
out on G’s acre we still our dice, our dreaming
to be with a wood thrush’s flute
snow, cops, rain of smoke I always
think the next horrible season
walking Grant rows and rows
of loans “not killed but smashed”
two zero two zero toward
where cops did what they knew
they’d lie about later
you remember with supreme resolution
they were on a car hood heckling snipers
perched on the roof of the jail
that was the truth in Niagara Square, not
anything won, yet, except
an amplification and increase
in the speed the crashing
/
how to get out of
perpetual reconstruction of the crime scene
Meech, Gugino, India Cummings
so many more lives rain
at last, J & C & I peel our greens
into trash bags a little fast
our tempos try to forget
debt’s discipline trash bags
of greens pile against the fence
vine-resplendent, heavy, jeweled
worlds how do you write
about the massacre, P asks
without turning what should be political into
art? the blizzard 41 dead, reported
in the fires of June
I want to have a kid, C says
/
in this transit of harm
of care, in the fire the flood the riots
of cops, scattered gardens
factory-fed dirt, among these
lead webs and water, scattered glitching
fragments is this a cemetery or park
stairway to an elevated track so
many cities smashed
tumbling along Buffalo’s streets
/
we take a walk, ask, again, what’s a city? Carra
& Jeremy, with food-heavy bags or back-hoe
sent by city hall to tear down
26 Garner, gave the man nowhere
to go fast—a city a holy place
desecrated by need
Buffalo, a holy place
desecrated by need
/
we take a walk, we are
always walking in a small
poor city in several small poor cities
grinding against a friend’s
house, perhaps, if it’s still there
in the right timeline, our even knowing
scrambled—enormous, relentless machine—
almost there, C looks up
surprised, darts for my hand
in this empire’s third century of life