DEATH Poem: Urban Mutilation, by Anastasia Taylor

“Praise the Mutilated World” -Adam Zagajewski

Who decides what is mutilation
And who gets to praise it?

And should I smile as the only one left behind?

I’ve seen the pimpling of skyscrapers,
jutting unnaturally from a flattened landscape.
Offices on offices on
rooftop bars,
Sparkling high enough to ignore
folks,
skittering like angry ants around
tents pitched on sidewalks
I’ve seen eyes trained forward
or downward
or upward but,
never at each other and
speaking when spoken to
treated like a
lapse of sanity.

I’ve seen
houses turned haunted,
schools emptied of children,
crumbling streets filled with rusting mechanical nightmares,
weeds weaved into empty sidewalks,
and roots breaking up slabs into gravel.

I’ve seen the endless sprawl of urban blight.
The mass exodus of, first, the whites,
And, then, those who could pretend to afford it.

I’ve seen cookie cutter homes
shaped into the image of domestic bliss.
I’ve seen forests leveled for
new homes every fifteen years,
running from violence as it spreads like a sickness;
a plague of Black and poor slowly seeping into sterilized communities;
wrought iron and Jim Crow not enough to dam the flow,
but damn do those HOAs try.

I’ve seen neighborhoods turned cemeteries,
my front yard turned grave and
my driveway tombstone.

I’ve seen
blood dripping down the storm drain
And warm and cooling bodies laying on my street.

I see a for rent sign where my neighbor used to stay.
I see a for sale sign where my neighbor used to stay.
I see a charred skeleton where my neighbor used to stay.
I see a concrete slab where my neighbor’s neighbor used to stay.
I don’t see my neighbors.

I’ve seen a city rot beneath my hands and my feet.

Is it mutilation if this is all I have ever known
And will the praise stop the bleeding?