Mid, by midwest
2020; Variable spread (cover is 10 x 12 in, pages are 8 x 10 in); Brick, mortar, steel, cement, chain link, inkjet prints
Additional writing:
Midwest, in place.
The thought of place remains opaque in its nature, as it teeters between conceptuality and literal locality. Place is simultaneously both the objective physical and affective subjective. As such, a place must supervene itself upon a physical space while simultaneously act as a setting for experience to “take place”. The latter is the place on which subjectivity is founded.
The structure of subjectivity is given in and through the scaffolding of place. This reading of subjectivity is necessarily tied to agency, as it is embodied spatially by some place, and is fully able to extend beyond the subject to encompass objects, people, and events. Thus, the affective qualia of place asks that there be, in company, human presence.
From place, there is a particular desire of human beings “being-in” such, as it is coupled with the sense of physical containment and inclusion. In this manner, the midwest is no more than a Tupperware® container filled with the remnants of dinner. *Note that there remains disparity between leftovers.
Different from the various vessels that may contain the North, South, West, or East, the Midwestern basin holds in it things dissimilar that yet are to remain in congruence. Beyond its core, there is only a veneer of historical and topographical happenings that originally gathered such a place. There was not the draw or promise of a goldened prosperity, but rather an inducement to settle. Nor was there unity in locale derivative of war—instead, the region was drawn and quartered on war’s border.
Only that of those caught in migration, the midwest contains, and is contained by, the process of journeying through, of flying over, for even the water is but passing by.
The midwest is an archway,
gravesite,
tinned seed.
Tombstones are awnings pitched onto blackened beams
of a shotgun denuded
for bricks reaped.
Silos and sirens
chase for lines of cut cocaine on
poverty divides.
On the side of the road is a dead can of deer from Belleville.
To follow the streetcars' ghosts,
to walk alongside buried tracks
where prosperity once ran,
Shoots at the thinning crescent from your hanged hip
only to land in the midwest,
Where uniforms in fleet
pick people from the back of the bus
to bleed out toward the feats of police.
Another dead deer roadkill.
There are fields of corn and calluses on the hands and feet of the women and men who must carry strong down the Mississippi.
Here is means with no end—
Prejudice—
undressed in her discrimination.
The place within the in between,
a strip of water that flows to our sisters,
Horizon chain-linked from the ankles of the westward through to the east.