Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

An estimated 100 million people around the globe are homeless and 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing. It’s a problem that haunts the United States and the rest of the world. I see it more and more in cities I visit—whether it’s Seattle, San Francisco, New York, or the city where I live, Lexington, Kentucky. Like many of you, I’ve pressed dollars into people’s palms and offered blankets or food to folks I’ve encountered on the street. But it never seems like enough. Or rather, it simply isn’t enough. I know this.

Officials the world over have tried to address the worsening crisis. It’s ongoing, it’s systemic, and it’s been exacerbated by poverty, trauma, the mental health crisis, addiction, and the pandemic. I am not sure if we will see the end of the homeless crisis anytime soon, but one thing is for certain, an important step is to remember the humanity of everyone who has suffered homelessness throughout the years.

Today’s poem honors the lives of those who have experienced homelessness, and does so with a particular attention that is also a call to action.

Park Benches with Teeth
by Mohammed El-Kurd

I live by people whose beds
                         are a pillow and a blanket,
                                                         a bus seat,
                                  a seatless bus stop,
                                a cold hard pavement,
                a potential they slept on or
were robbed of. I live by people
whose dreams are
                                              adequate,
               but not selfish enough,
whose dreams are without adjectives,
                                                          postponed,
                                      pocket-sized, and
famished.
Told to find the glass in the sand,
hunger dreams of spat out
generosity
and cement
defanged

Not a dollar is a blanket
not a guilt is a table
to place meals on or 
discuss
their humanity
around.

Not a sound nor a nod
can make my fury monetary
when I hear shivers crackling like fires
from my bedroom.

Not a poem nor a post is enough to turn
                               the post they live under into a tent.
Not one of them has bent, gathered our prayers, and weaved them
into a home or a hoodie.


I live by people for whom ceilings are luxuries,
      for whom park benches have teeth at night,
                     pointing upwards and into sleep’s flesh,
     and for whom jail cells are mandatory motels
                              for when the city decides to dust its pillows.
Every morning I pass them by,
tessellated under bridges and into performative priorities
                                     with hooded identities,
                                    mostly of certain wrists:
                                                          wrists that bend or
                                                                        slice open or
                            contemplate death                                    scarred by cuffs or
                          leashed to a misfortune or a debt.

I live by people whose solace
                            is a fruit well-known
                                   and spoken ill of,
                  whose solace is sins, sex,
                histories of moving bricks
                                or throwing bricks
                                at uniformed pigs,
whose solace is a reminiscing of a bed.

I live by people whose mattresses              are memory,
                                                                                           are substance,
                                                                                           are made featherless,
                                                                                                            fatherless
with springs, elusive
                             and marching upwards and into the 
backs of their necks, their spines
                                                        troubled, unfixed,
their stories come unhinged, their eyes
after                a dollar or a supper
      but not a dollar nor a supper,
                   not a protest nor a pretense.
Not a protest nor a pretense.

"Park Benches With Teeth" by Mohamed El-Kurd, from RIFQA copyright © 2021 Mohamed El-Kurd. Used by permission of Haymarket Books.