Lawrence Joseph

Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay, from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets I take to work. The front yard of roses — did I write their names down correctly? — Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale. Q31 bus, among the words I hear are Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated, Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not physically well, a poor man, arrested on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose, on the street, held, choked, left unconscious, still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death, according to the autopsy report, a homicide — rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins, by employees of the Agency’s contractor, isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence explains, but, merely, legally justified means of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house. He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace, the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual. In what place, the Federal Reserve’s monetary spigots and banks’ access to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce the market’s decline — in what places, violations of which forms of which eternal laws? Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place? On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike, in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.

i Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson breached, millions of gallons of it north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site, East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South, Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl, Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately in hurricane sky. ii Perhaps I make too much of it, that time, Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped in some sort of liquid to protect them from dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused — that time, night shift, press-machine shop on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in, fixed up, because the work you do is around fire your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right. iii When the mind is clear, to hear the sound of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude of syllables pronounced. When the mind is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio, at a holy water font, a mother washes her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident so that they’ll heal. iv So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted, Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole. v Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels, in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity the greatest number of children in United States history are, now, incarcerated, having been sentenced by law. vi A comic dimension to it, on this F train to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you, but, see, he was stabbed in the face with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — here, look, he’ll show you — a white-and-pink-colored iris.

Before dawn, on the street again, beneath sky that washes me with ice, smoke, metal. I don't want to think the bullet pierced my shoulder, the junkie's rotten teeth laughed, his yellow hair froze. I'm careful: 1 smoke Turkish tobacco cigarette butts, 1 drink a lot to piss a lot, I fry the pig in its own fat, eat the knuckles, brain, and stomach; I don't eat the eyes! Always four smokestacks burning bones, somewhere tears that won't stop, everywhere blood becomes flesh that wants to say something. It's not me shouting at no one in Cadillac Square: it's God roaring inside me, afraid to be alone.