Non-place

You drive down a street

named for a long-leveled hill

it meanders in superstitious curves.

You pass the new condos

stone facades glued to plywood

form cloisters of anonymous neighbors.

The road pierces a thrombotic turnpike

and housing and shopping circuits

iterate to the horizon.

You keep your eyes fixed ahead of you

but the plots peel away

revealing a hungry maw.

The city swallows the turnpike

and heaves census tracts and industrial zones

auto lots high rises office parks

places that could be anywhere and are no-where.

Places rent from the land

with frayed seams that unravel

into condemned buildings and encampments.

Neighborhoods are overtaken

by non-places that simulate dwelling

not homes, but monuments to land speculation.

The city lurches and replicates

grafts veins over indigent precincts

and sprouts fangs for birds and vagrants.

The city is haunted

by liminal shades that frequent

the empty bus station or unclaimed lot

their whispers, lost in the dull roar

tell what these places were or could have been.

But at the end of the seared concrete

obscured by lattice or chain link

beneath the piles of refuse

and detritus of things not remembered

from the loamy soil there shoots dandelions

and other things that grow untended.

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JESSICA HENDERSON

Jessica Henderson grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Boston. Besides poetry, she likes painting, reading, and dancing.