The Paris Review - Fall 2016

Lawrence Joseph
IS WHAT IT IS
Fulton near Pearl, dug up to lay new Fulton Center
subway power lines, a stone wall, three feet high,
in silt-muck seven feet below street level, inside it
a ceramic bird’s half-blue, half-yellow head, stem
of a pipe, chunk of glazed seventeenth-century stoneware
decorated with the arms of Amsterdam, huge turkey
vultures taking a liking to the landfill, the preferred source
of food for peregrine falcons is pigeons. His own police
department, the mayor brags, seventh-largest army
in the world, and remember, too, the United Nations
is here, so he has his own state department, too, an entrée
into the diplomatic world. Gets deep inside the head, this man
says—he’s permanently disabled—affects you emotionally,
what’s happened here, pulverized glass, concrete, lead,
asbestos traces, crap, he calls it, here, he shows you
the albuterol and epinephrine he must at all times carry.
To cool your head you walk. Statue of Confucius on
the Bowery, rice-bean cakes, chicken feet, curried squid
on Division, under the Manhattan Bridge, on Canal to Seward
Park, a piece of torn yellow tape tied to a tree, this woman
shouting into her smart phone go fuck yourself and die,
large black letters—in Russian?—on the freighter’s hull
fade imperceptibly into one another. Supply route to deliver
food to non-government-held areas in Aleppo severed,
three hundred thousand at risk of starvation, electricity
cut off, markets, houses, schools, bombed hospitals,
migrant smuggling worth more, now, than the trade in drugs
and weapons—those profits confined to those in a position
to play, venture capital, private equity, hedge-fund operators,
stock buybacks leveraged, paid for by money borrowed
at artificially low Federal Reserve Bank–charged interest rates,
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