on the bay area housing crisis
police with assault rifles
and battering rams, trucked in
on military grade humvees
evicted moms and their babies
after fifty-three days of peaceful survival / / /
they waited till the early morning
they waited till it was coldest
they waited till they thought
no one was looking
a few days later the real estate company
who called the cops in the first place
agreed to sell it back to the residents
at less than the market rate
and the mayor took credit
and news outlets stopped covering the
story because that was considered the
end and a win
and the police returned to their
regularly scheduled blend of
violence and vitriol
and the empty houses in Oakland
still outnumbered the unhoused
four to one / / /
poems are so often insufficient
as communal memories
because they so often rely
on esoteric line breaks
and secret metaphors.
so this is not a poem.
it’s a dutiful accounting of a history
because when we hold the power,
when we run this shit,
we’ll need to remember who
held guns at us
and begged us not to live.
if you put a fifty dollar bill in the change machine
at E-Z Laundromat it reads like a twenty. which is a
mistake I watched man in a suit make the other day.
who does laundry in a suit?
I don’t know what fifty dollars worth of quarters
feels like. or twenty.
but I know the weight of a name when a name becomes
nothing but a place floating in one’s memory.
a resonance of a dream. a type of swamp.
in the twenty-first century, grief expires within the hour.
they should sell timers at mortuaries.
if all goes right,
I will have forgotten you before the dryer is done.
if every clock in this room told the same time,
that would be too simple. a baby boy, in the arms of
his mother is a name and a story. the washer thumps
like it’s broken. I’m tired of convincing myself of the
cleanliness of my own life. the baby boy’s breath is stinky
on his mother’s chin and there’s a line for the change machine
and tonight you will comment on how nice my shirt looks
when it’s clean and you will mean it. because we don’t
have new shirt money. but we have clean shirt money.
i.
everything begins
with pedestrians
a man walking in the street
is a painting
insofar that he takes up space
and is made to be seen
ii.
a pile of bodies
makes the news
very rarely
iii.
a school board member choked a teacher last spring
I am aware that our bodies are undervalued
iv.
there was a heating issue in my apartment building
and our landlord blamed the tenants
so we unionized
and he stopped blaming
v.
there is no dignity in silence
silence is a virtue only for the capitalist oppressors
vi.
my father told me all cops are good
and I believed him for too long
Jacob Fowler
Jacob Fowler (he/him/his) is an elementary school teacher living in Oakland, CA. His work has appeared in Wellington Street Review, Soft Cartel, and The Sunlight Press, among others. You can find him on Twitter @online_jacob_.