from BUFFALO FREE RAPID TRANSIT

Joe Hall

Fireballs 2

for Marty Cain

Shaved metal curls into
snarls, fireballs amplify fireballs
in dreams of trains draining down
the future’s flaming throat
fireballs in the grid of law that
protects above balls of fire
and property above all fire
we recall a million bosses
landlords, fireballs or laws
but what about the machine that
replaces a dream of difference
with landlords, fireballs, landlords
and laws? say take the money
or take nothing at all, or I remember
tearing across a lawn looking for
pastel easter eggs stuffed with
dollar bills—losing made me
want to beat my cousins’ asses
more than a fistful of jellybeans
more than this occasion to strip-mine
my vulnerability, which
Buck Downs said, noodle-slurping
in a square, leaving a landscape
projector to twitch in the muddle at
the end of no rope, where do you go
when you can see through the
smeared plastic dome, fireballs
slowly patrolling the foreheads
of buildings? what do you do
when you got to choose the money
that bruises and a long slide down
the telephone to the ear of whoever’s job
it is to keep you waiting
at the unemployment office
so maybe 8 months of missed checks
show up, but what if they
don’t, what if it’s your job
to stand for ten hours
among stainless steel shelves
gooping sandy orange icing
onto the face of a cake
they say it’s a sun
but you know it’s a fireball
and when you cut into the cake
after no one picks the fireball up
it bleeds page after page of blankness

Directions to the Meeting Hall on Connecticut

In the snow and cold ash, the call, the prayer, the petition for assistance, release
along its length, Delevan’s shaggy back quakes, the root-cables radiate
golden wellspring, all the rain leaps into snow, and we’re not leaving

these council chambers until someone stops fighting us
cabbage worms’ pale wings flash on their hinge
what a brass and living planet Buffalo could be, what gravity

but the mayor’s club puts the dead to work baking steel bread
at the base of the pyramid that is this planet-encompassing machine
I can feel the bus coming for me but the bus has no name

I can feel the blood pump down Ferry, muscle, sinew
and lymph, the tides of Lake Erie eating away the hills
of Tifft, through their green skin, into the snow and bleeding trash

In the House of Cancer

Trying to memorize
anatomy w/five herniated
things, to take the art
of love into the foundry of a
college classroom jammed
full of gurneys, the final
exam: inserting a
catheter into yourself
while measuring
enough opium to put
the Prof. down
angels leave, chemical
trains arrive, to graduate
I get on, in
my backless gown

/

to die on the train not having arrived
in a municipality of love but
following a thread to
the center, malachite dust
filtering down from angels
long gone to deliver
for Uber eats, angels pulled
into the trees in the pincers of
breaths between orders
they never came back
I don’t want to die
until I know
where I’ve arrived
it could be a garden
of someone else’s spotted
rose potted among the blue feet
of the cancer ward

/

and if I could enter
the ocean, if I found
a factory there and
you were in scrubs
smoking on your phone your
face and hair powdered by
something fine enough to
float, so that you were playing
the bleached spirit of yourself

/

you turn to me, half
your lip raised, you say
you’re transplanting planets
into the soft rigs of strangers
your phone buzzes, you
say that means you’ve
got to get back to work, you
say this city was a
dream anyway
and the man inserting the
port below your armpit
around which your skin will
stay red and crinkled
may or may not be
a cop, your father, life
goes on, unclasped
no moon is rising
though this gown has no pockets
my phone buzzes again

Double, Deep Funded

In this damp branch
channeling mist, this ear follows
the sun in its arc, trying to sort
knotted threads of radiation
after watching an old man C knows

bleed from his gashed head because
cops shoved him to the pavement
outside city hall, most of
Buffalo Common Council
believes they are surrounded by
bots, believes, in their hearts

people are not moved in response
to Martin Gugino’s blood spreading across City Hall’s feet
and would rather re-conjure any Satan
than pluck bad apples from the holy tree
of cops in the concrete garden of
Gethsemane.

Myles Carter, who built
playgrounds, ziptied, in his words
like he was Osama, after cops
tackled him, hands up, giving

an interview to a news camera, so what
if ppls outrage is uniform and solid
like bricks and there are the cops in the morning,
unashamed, outside the courthouse
to cheer their union bros
let off the hook for cracking Gugino’s head, and
there the cops are at the lip

of the protest chanting fired
fired fired to the ex-cop
kicked off the force for trying
to stop her partner from choking
a handcuffed man fired fired fired
when one cop’s fingers

fuse, expand then the rectangular railway tie his
hand have become drag him to the
ground, his back stiffens, his two extended self
become a silver rail, another cop beside
him seizes up, drops, parallel in position

another cop hinges, downward
dog, seizes the rails of
the other cops, his rib
cage flares like a nostril
into a concavity, bright and sterile

people step in, late enough
already, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit slides off
the courthouse empty as a daydream
the kind of thing that did not happen

Joe Hall was first taught poetry by Lucille Clifton, Jeffrey Coleman, and two decades of bad jobs. Buffalo Free Rapid Transit is his sequel to the critically acclaimed Fugue & Strike (2023), which Current Affairs calls “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” Protean, The Cleveland Review of Books, Eighteen-Century Fiction, Poetry Daily, Annulet, mercury firs, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have featured his writing. He has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers, and is currently engaged in community education on Palestine.