In the photo we stand shoulder to shoulder,
seven of us covered in soot and dirt
costumed in masks or respirators,
with old t-shirts tied over heads and faces,
mismatched work-gloves, wrecking bars
and shovels in hand. Wearing stunned looks
like Kentucky coal-miners adrift in time,
we are caught there in the dark, lit
starkly by auto-flash while around us
a grotto lies buried in debris—avalanche
of charred beam-ends and burnt flooring,
plaster chunks spiky with wood lath,
tables and armchairs crushed underneath
a midden of household trash.
This was the slag of living, pushed off
the upper stories over ten years of work—
gravity our chief organizing principle—
as we carved homes out of tenements
from the top down, always deferring
the work of removal for another time,
leaving a ground-floor mound we now
excavated a decade later in an act
of reclamation, a penance. Proud
that day, filling a thirty-yard dumpster
bucket by bucket, overcoming collectively
an inertia too enormous for any one soul,
as the dust rose so thick that we lost sight
of each other, lost our breaths and swallowed
lead, lime, ash, the toxins of the last century,
became our building and its past. The women
brought water and stopped to laugh at us,
take our pictures, but we kept on, pausing
only to show off our treasures—a green jug
stuffed with used syringes, a guitar neck
jangling with strings, someone’s melancholy
stash of beer bottles refilled with old piss
and capped. In an up-ended refrigerator
of the 1960’s, I found a t.v. dinner,
still unopened, the colors on the package
all gone to gray. These things are not visible
in the photo, itself lost with the eviction
that came later—bulldozed, I suspect,
in a Jersey landfill. I rebuild this all here
from memory, where I’ve kept it safe.
—Peter Spagnuolo
Peter Spagnuolo lives and works in Brooklyn. A letterpress chapbook of his sonnets, 10 x 14, is available from Booklyn at www.booklyn.org.
