Extinction as An Urbanology Walking Tour

1860: Factories pop up on the waterfront, and industrialization and rapid expansion take over.
Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” shows the longshoremen and wage-earners.

 The last of the Grasshopper Sparrows, nested on the banks of Coney Island,
Konijnen, “rabbit island,” the unsounded transference of Lenape etymology.
Vanderbilt, DeKalb, and the Dutch West Indian Corporation, taxed all cargo.
Audited Haitian imports, in siloed counties, accounting of conflicting tradition.
Once, out in the empire’s dredge, emigre retirees played rezinochka on the Boardwalk.
There, out in the soundless imperial symphonies, more-than-unnatural

shipping interests. They say, an Auto-Ethnography: dances banked on the boardwalk, drunken teens and second chances.
Wherein, Survivors taught grandchildren –– fencing champions touchéed their bright retribution.
Let me paint: the algaic loam in lustrous moon, a feverish bubble, Basking Sharks, Nemertines, Oarfish,
Old Testament Leviathan breached emerald scabbed-hump of night,
unidentifiable by cargo watchers; but still seen from porous land in numbleress clusters. 
Here, close your eyes, smell, all that sieved in the roiling fat soap of the Bay, glowed in fever bubbles, in the dark.

On Luna Park, the Steeplechase Park –– a mapping in underworld history.
You survived. Alone. Still, the pointed tip of factory cuts, alone,
bells transported song from sparrows across the rolling soap fat of outflow. 
Perplexed, an unadulterated rolling, a soft smell of justice, burned burnt
layers of greasy tickets, inside wood- and steel-framed roller coasters, pitched.
Broke stone, broke broke, summoned from the inert ground, Hell’s flocks
Wine-adored-song, outta extinction. The sands narrowed. Not even a finger left to drift.

Tour ends. The narrative shifts, the cartographer pivots the map, returns it to a former existence. 
The Earth smelled of anti-extinction, suffused with verdant mosquitoes, mice, rats.
Ended. The Colonialist memory cracked. Indiana Paintbrush smacked against wampum.  
A factory of chemical colors, laughable, portrayed, selling gold for oysters, and pelts.
This is not a tour.
The antidote was far from the urbanologist’s mouth. 

ξ

The Archaeology of Poverty: A Folk Story 

Brownsville, NY became a repository for many housing projects in the era of Robert Moses –– a thriving
capital of Jewish immigrants where the lots and structural developments served as cultural bonds.

Survived: in stem grass, walnut tree, fields of knives
In Brownsville, from the old country: the cart pushed pickled vegetables and herring
Where on Pitkin Avenue, in storm cellars, from the empty lots, moths congregate.
Broken survival, woolen autumn coat, and shyster, street-economics, left grass, stems, knives ––
Where emerald, lichen, love stories imposed over vials and syringes, generational moths
Chosen to forego the cigar ash and sweet crabgrass. The sweet thereafter. From Hungary
This storm, a scholarship where life emigrated on the wing-bands of a sphinx moth 
When the wings crossed and scavenged and flushed to find freedom.

  The segregated amber sap from steel. The Williamsburg sunrise is the hackneyed release 
Of a desk lamp with his sister you never could woo, in a two-bedroom window,
With a rabbit hutch on the fire escape, oral histories: Grandad won the war and lost to alcohol
Historically loosened borders, stood on line in a rubric of public subsidies.

Despite the cracks in their chrysalis, still, their playgrounds leafed.
A cicada with rose-red eyes Erroneous, scavenged the stillness.
And monsters under beds creaked like wood floors along Van Dyke and breached
The Yiddish hip-hop community at summer's peak, performed scenes
From gangster movies. In parks, after work, flushed by commercial avenues, emerged and breached
The doldrum of poverty-by-design.  

ξ 

Jonathan Andrew Pérez is a poet who has published in over 50 literary journals including but not limited to poetry online and in print in: POETRY Magazine, River Heron Review, Frontier Poetry, [PANK], and others. He won the 2019 Split Lip Poetry Prize, selected by Chen Chen; the 2020 Burnside Review Chapbook Prize; and the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Prize at the Raw Art Review. Pérez’s chapbooks include The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press 2019); and The Divining: Dark Was the Night of Justice, which won the 2020 Burnside Review National Chapbook prize is slated for Spring 2021. Pérez is also the founder of Justiceology-By-Design, a justice and equity incubator, and he has published a number of articles calling for the decriminalization of identity and the abolition of pathologizing black and brown communities. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan.