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      November 24, 2017I Hear America RustingKamal E. Kimball

      All the fluorescent lights tonight
      try to buff the dark to a shine
      in the rec centers
      and the laundromats and the beer glints
      in the glasses, the cans. Sloshing
      waves of amber. There’s a slow
      sort of hunger as we watch the cars
      grunt by, those gleaming dumb machines
      are foreign and we want
      to go home. The entire night
      is chalked with the evidence of us.
      We pass the crime scene
      where workers mill around, faces
      tight and shiny with tragedy.
      Some start marching,
      thrust their signs at nightsticks
      as flagpoles corrode in their hands.
      The bone whites
      cell reds, the blues. Their eyes flint
      into the wind that scratches off
      our oxide smokestacks,
      our scraped-out mountains, hollowed
      wombs, our streets in Detroit
      in Ferguson Youngstown
      Baltimore Philly Cincinnati Gary
      Dayton and Flint. The crumbling
      is quickening
      here where it used to boom.
      Paint flakes off the brittle
      black factory doors.

      from #57 - Fall 2017

      Kamal E. Kimball

      “I’ve lived most of my life in the Rust Belt, and have always been struck by its contradictions. It’s America’s breadbasket, overflowing with wheat, corn, and soybeans in the summer. I grew up in Michigan, where we spent long, refreshing afternoons on the beaches of the state’s many lakes. Yet the Rust Belt is also scarred with burned-out factories and dotted with towns that opiates and meth have ravaged. There is a looming sense of frustration, an anger at the past and for the future. This tension permeates my writing, which is at once abundant with musicality and haunted by a sense of something missing.”

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