wildscape. literary journal

What You’ve Done with the Place
by Elizabeth Shanaz

Fox News calls it new growth and
old problems in the neighborhood. But
the brokers say the city has been resuscitated.
None of our breath counting before,
they mistook it for a quick death.

Acacia wood paneling kisses
black stucco kisses
numbers in Century Gothic font kisses
a fiddle leaf fig in a soulless cement planter.
No one bothered to check if that plant can even survive
out here, but I guess they never checked on any of us
either. Never checked which climates nurtured
our seeds before we became a reluctant garden.

Walls of first-class grade material erected with
union labor to obscure that all of the bones are still
the same. That out here we still have squares of
sidewalk with Jordan footprints, or the anniversary
of a couple now married to other people.
Out here they still burn their tongues on corn oils.
Still chase vermin from rooms they could
swear they cleaned.
Spirits of Santeria still reclined over the corners on which
they were conjured.
Still fill your chest with bullets and say you were like that
when they got there.
Still drop your body in the bay and say
you were just going for a swim.
Still crying on the news, trying to convince the camera lens,
“he was such a good kid.”

about the author // Elizabeth Shanaz