Blood-Drenched Luck

They tore down the Victorians and corner stores that had made the community and put up big complexes with giant silver abstract statues and anti-skateboarding, anti-sleeping benches. They tore down private gardens for corporate gardens. At night, it is empty as an apocalypse. Few lights in windows to be seen from the balcony of one of the last houses. Few can afford to light those windows up. Ghosts, former neighbors, shuffle in the dark to find a doorway to camp. The theater close by only has safe shows now that won’t make you wonder too much about what’s going on, or what native people were moved or killed, or which people after were rushed off. The local bars, once for the working class to meet after work and where poets screeched dissatisfaction, now have hunting trophies, expensive drafts and adhere to noise complaints. You don’t know how much longer you can float, you and the parts of you that have lived here before any of this. You watch the empty advent calendar of the apartment complex that looms in front of your house. The only opened and bright box, a new family crammed in a room celebrating their bounty, their blood-drenched luck and the absence of gunshots, sirens, inconvenience or questions.