Little Room with Fire Inside
Two Poems for Minneapolis, 2020
Little Room with Fire Inside #1
We’ve been driving the Northside all night
looking for fires and stop over South to see
what is left. A white roll of thawed beef,
another bobs out from the flooded grocery store.
The air is ripe with the acrid singe of metal.
Where is all this water coming from?
I shift my backpack, heavy with a fire
extinguisher, pull my pants above my ankles,
adjust the .45 tucked in my waistband.
In the distance, a man carves into an ATM
with a chainsaw, wipes his brow
in the scorched light and begins again.
The chainsaw whirs a feral song. The ragged
metal hum rises and falls. The water rushes
and if I had closed my eyes then, I might have
thought it were a waterfall or creek,
a single woodsman logging far off
in the distance. I might have thought
I was in another place where the leaves stir
dark as the char of memory. Where
is all this water coming from?
We wander down 27th, the sour burn
of tear gas still hanging in the air.
Gandhi Mahal—where I had my 30th birthday,
where friends would gather and eat
after poetry readings—is gone, brick unkilned
back to clay. Black ocean in the street. Where is all this—
The water pours faster into what were basements
once. I close my eyes. Listen. Waterfalls.
Creeks. A wren. Louder and then—
the chainsaw.
//
The heat of the liquor store on fire makes
the dumpster behind it explode.
The body of a man trapped inside will be found
weeks from now in the ashes. We stand
in the heat and watch the police station
across the street go up in flames.
Thousands cheer and dance—shadows
huge and flickering—in the thundering glow.
There’s no going back.
I look on.
Over twenty fucking dollars.
I nod.
I have wanted to see it burn for so long.
//
Nearly a decade ago, outside
the same precinct, we protested
the killing of a boy my age then,
the same story again and again.
The present, the accumulation
of unreckoned history.
History, the unlit kindling
of a dead sky soldered closed.
It is the kiln flung open
in the midst of its firing,
the core of this country revealed
in a flash.
//
It was after that protest,
almost a decade ago—back home
on the Northside—I scrolled through
photos of Aleppo, before and after.
A radiant metropolis shelled
into a shell. How does this happen?
//
Here in South Minneapolis, he drives
the chainsaw against the ATM, a humming
key brimmed with panic
into an iron door
at the center of the world
with no walls left standing around it.
On the other side—the other side—
the moon glows, the shining wheel of history rolling.
I know now how it happens.
It happens overnight.
//
(Liquor store outside of the Third Precinct the night the precinct was burned down)
Little Room With Fire Inside #2
The National Guard and nearly every cop
in the city have pushed the protestors a mile west
of here—they could have pushed them east,
but east is where the White owned businesses are—
amidst the chanting: undercover cops
and saboteurs co-opt the moment, making terror
of grief, Klan and neo-Nazis roll in—undercover
of revolt—from out of state and the suburbs,
all across the city unmarked trucks speed wildly
down the streets, men who look like they could be
my cousins lean out and shoot into the sky.
Somali men defend the library with machetes
from arsonists trying to break inside. The imams guard
the mosques. The pastors, the churches. The kids,
their schools and grandmother’s houses.
Earlier on the Northside, where already there is little
left to burn—since the rebellions of 1967—but the late hours
Northsiders keep in keeping watch over each other,
my neighbors caught some White teens from Wayzata
trying to burn down the pharmacy on Lyndale.
One of the Arab cafes on Broadway and the beauty shop
next door were torched by an IED lobbed onto the roof.
Just after, the Fade Factory, a Black owned barbershop
off 26th went up in flames. We joined the barbers and neighbors
with hoses, fire extinguishers, sorrow, and terror, and felt—
foolishly—for a moment we might be able to put it out
before the windows exploded and the roof fell in.
It is something worse than helpless, what you feel
as you try to help a man save his burning business
with a garden hose and kitchen fire extinguisher
when there is nothing left to save. It is a feeling
more than strange to be certain you’d kill
whoever burned it down and not think twice about it,
and that, if you did, it wouldn’t do any good
and you’d do it anyway. Even hours later, too exhausted
to feel even anger or the cold water against your ankles—
how it feels the same as the metal against your waist—
so exhausted the need for sleep has passed you now,
and you are not even sorry to see it go,
you feel something like music and go on as such,
dangerously and alive, driving through the streets
with your friends night after night, more than 1,000 miles
in a neighborhood hardly three miles wide,
all through this city, racked with love
for what is not yet gone and refuses to go,
your friends, and your neighbors, without whom
this place would feel like no place at all,
less than the dust it is made of, less than the dust
it is becoming—one fire at a time—smoke
settling over the city like black ink in water.
//
For an earlier piece reflecting on this period, disability and resistance click here