THE YEAR OF DISAPPEARING TENTS
They swept up baby pictures like
they swept up obituaries. They swept up
ashes of a husband, & told no one
where to find him. They swept up
sacred heart pendants, a patchwork quilt,
a sprig of lavender pressed into a bible.
The grim faces looked on, numbed
by the lashes of the wind. The cops didn’t feel
the same gravity of living, how the weight of things
glommed like moonlets onto Saturn.
They didn’t look close enough to see
that, inside the tent, there was a backyard in Kansas.
Inside the backyard was a family.
Inside the family was a universe in which
everything turned out different. They swept up
a sweater with one specific thread,
which scaled a cephalic vein & left
the right atrium, where it twisted its amplitude
into a bloodied ball of cotton, before
soaring through a heavenly door &
reuniting with a son. In the dust bin
were love letters signed by sparklers. There were
hammers & socket wrenches ringing
to the underworld, summoning the spirit
of a father. They swept in like a thunderstorm,
water flogging down, chasing along
the streets, whirling through the manhole
covers, so that it seemed a caricature of something
so horrible, you have to wonder if it’s real.
Like in Hollywood when someone at their lowest—
broke, divorced, can’t get any lower—
walks off into the jungle, makes one wrong turn,
& is swallowed, bones and all, by quicksand.
—from Poets Respond
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Seth Peterson: “I recently stumbled upon the work Propublica has done to document the cost of ‘sweeps’ of homeless encampments. Like many, I have mixed feelings about the practice. This poem is informed, in part, by letters written by the unhoused people whose things were taken in sweeps. One woman said her husband’s ashes were taken and she hoped ‘he wasn’t in the dump.’ Last year (2024) saw the number of sweeps increase across the country, a trend that will likely continue in 2025.”
