DISPLACEMENT

by Erik Schwab

Graphic source: The Daily Plant.

It’s not that they’re screaming. It isn’t pain exactly,

in the market garden, these kohlrabis and cabbages,

these garlic scapes: it’s that they’re in shock. Harvest

is our word, theirs must be apocalypse. But another

word is anthropomorphize and someone told me

once I shouldn’t do it and I believed them and found

the stump of my root dunked in a washbasin and divested

of holy dirt. Now near the end of time

I wish medications were poems, I wish I were floating

over lakewater, skipping silver marbles instead of

saying the new things I say every reluctant day: I’m

on the mend, thanks, thanks, I’m grateful for the

prayer, for the sea urchin, for the red beetle, for

the cabinet of curiosities you sent and for the gig driver

who lost three family members while my heart was 

locked behind a thick pandemic door.

The right kind of time traveler would go twenty years back

and plant that tree, but we service-patched cyborgs

haul our untested upgrades in one direction only, toward

the gracious refusal, toward the retirement of connections, until

the building falls in the middle of the night, the slumbering tenants

dreaming of skydiving and waking to astonishment.

Erik Schwab lives in Seattle, WA. Last year he started writing poems for the first time since college, with the invaluable help of a weekly workshop at Community Building Art Works.

ALL TENANTS ARE SCUM

by David Susswein

Grenfell Tower before the fire. Image source: Blueprint Printing.

I pasted aluminium and sparked diamonds
upon a crow of dirty concrete slabs
my followers know
I made their sight beautiful;

inside cockroaches leaped and prayed in their ways,
darkness, as they had their dirty sex, and bred

their roach mothers scrawl-scrubbed their children
clean of
black, darker skins
make them whiter white, right for our times

those scum dislike water
and won’t buy expensive organic food.

I hand pick cereal flowers for my kids
kiss them in milk hand-picked cows
glower them in precious Branded clothes
I drive a Bugatti, and always will.

Tenants in [Jared] Kushner’s East Village buildings . . . have often complained about lack of services. In April, residents of 118 East 4th Street, after five months spent with a garbage mountain in their backyard and with no cooking gas, won a court settlement in which [Kushner’s management company] Westminster agreed to make repairs, give rent-stabilized tenants 60 percent off their rent for the time without gas and market-rate tenants 30 percent off, and cover the tenants’ legal fees. —The Village Voice, January 12, 2017

Author’s note: As of today, 30 June 2017, one hundred and twenty-five tower blocks in the UK have failed fire-safety tests. Many thousands of the poor have been living in fire-hazards. Without knowing. The only thing keeping them safe is the lack of chip-pan fires, failed appliances. The state has left them vulnerable, hopeless and afraid. Anger is growing.


David Susswein writes from the bottom of England, close to the sea. He writes only to talk and communicate; to others he has never seen. Ramblings, such as above, can be found at Envoi, DreamCatcher, Picarroon Poetry, Morphrog.com, TuckMagazine, and others.