excerpts from Slow Violence
*
Severed hands appraise across centuries, gather, relocate. Consider we are working the line – most basic sameness of breathing. Gliding the vowels and stripping cabbages. Consider the concrete suspended, shipwrecked. That Whitmanic song which asks us to empty ourselves into a catalogue, I am trying, failing to find myself there. Hover above violence as it moves slowly across
*
some of us worked at the stadium
sometimes referred to as Green Cathedrals
the concessions were run by Legends I
was a cashier the work was menial
but it can get very busy middle
management who had been there longer
didn’t act like they were better than me
the inherent warmth and affection of
the crowd when the drumline picks up free food
(whenever my manager could use his
connections.) Hank Williams Jr. comes in
by helicopter to deliver the
game ball some of us were sweating in
athletic grey t-shirts. 3.5 million
gallons of water consumed monitoring
for victims of avian window
collisions as a cashier I have a source
of income game days are long but go by
pretty quick perks come with the job
of course throwing magnum cans of tomato
sauce against the side of the dumpster one
after another some of us kiss in the walk-in freezer
Here is the brick, it was waiting here birds
were left where they were found or occasionally
placed in adjacent trash containers you'll
feel pretty great about what you see it
is what it is sometimes other concessions
workers hook you up with free food sometimes
we trade Subway for Taco Bell wish it
were more often the food is awesome in
some of our opinions purple Doritos
pack the most punch views of the diamond the
stadion first as unit of measurement
about 600 feet for the original Greek foot
races later known as the track, the structure
the number of dead birds documented
in the stadium underestimates the actual
deaths that occurred there isn’t a bad seat
in the house it is what it is make your own
schedule The crowd is cheering, the crowd
is laughing in detail workers become like
family in high pressure environments
how long the baseball game is soccer
games are less than five hours some of us
made memories It is awesome working
in the stadium every day we chant Fuck
Tom Brady Fuck Tom Brady hydraulic
fluid on the streetlights so we can’t
climb someone mentions health or the
state, bob, weave in and out of it some
of us never considered ourselves
sickly shot off a text : hope you’re
well we ask the children to cough into
themselves really, it’s just taxing on the
body to move across fields those who lean
and loaf are comfortable I do not intend
to preach self-care as cure but sure
soak in Epsom salts do not forget
that we are still fighting for comfort
my brothers so susceptible
to fevers we triangulate to keep them here
on these Moses benches, under the Plane a plaque, extension
of empire, obscured by shrubbery THIS IS
THE FORMER SITE of preferential rent
shoulder pad, the helmet flies
*
Time, searching, again. And sitting in the window, interrupting to tend. No. The horse and the Plane. Brother, urns, fixing, again. Consider we are working the line—most basic sameness of breathing. Unpaid over time. The residue of years, in and out of stadiums. The stade was once a unit, so that one could say exactly and how hard it is to say. I can only speak for me alongside the shrill song of sparrows. Clay. House. Field. Lincoln. Savannah. Seaside. Swamp. Tree. Vesper. Fitting the body into others. A Niedecker. A sweatshirt. Accounted for. This one with others, exhausted. The head that drags. Look how the Plane has changed. The seeds have all dried on the first page. In a huddle, big team. Little me. Whose house? Deteriorating. Whose house? Look how it moves slowly across. Again
Katherine Duckworth
Katherine Duckworth is a poet working in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College where she also teaches in the English department. You can find her work most recently at Apartment Poetry.