The Cleveland Review of Books published an online version of my poem, “Breath Gradients, Block by Block” on election day. Bittersweet is an understatement. It’s meanings, to me, dilate and refocus in this recontextualization.

The poem started with me walking around Buffalo (neoliberal rotted) during the pandemic. In continued with how each those walks overlaps and departs from the other, how our transits make the city as the city makes us. It’s a poem about ground and sky, our community garden and greens (I always wanted to get greens in a poem in homage to my early teacher, Lucille Clifton) and the climate-chaos intensified Canadian infernos of 2021 (I think?). It’s a poem of digging, harvesting, the subterranean—those waste spaces below elevated roadways, graffiti, the plants there doing their chemistry below burning fuel. & practice, smoldering discontent, love. It’s going to be the final poem in my forthcoming collection Buffalo Free Rapid Transit, a book about the city that is and could be.

I owe some of the inspiration for this poem from the great Laura Jaramillo & her book Making Water. & to my friends and comrades in Buffalo. Thanks to Alyssa Perry for giving this a home at The Cleveland Review of Books. Alyssa’s new book Oily Doily kicks absolute ass.

This poem is also the last big thing I wrote before the g***n***c***d***–from a different world but not a discontinuous world. So, yeah, find your friends, hold on tight, & get ready to keep going hard for a different world.