from “Atlas”
…
against storms
or rebuild buffers. Marked losses
of the sea. Southern border
to reclaim the mutilated waterfront
to give shape to the city
along the shore westward
tilting. Shored
in concrete. Manhattan seawall
on striped bass
of the piers for non-water
the middle layer was powder
the rock salt
tar to fill the weight
of a dump truck
day-night on fill
in this dense metropolis what we found
of the world
a lucid vision
muddied at every turn
…
in no man’s land [sic]
a new way of life
how many lost neighborhoods
gave lungs to the city
of a freehold estate
Andrew Williams’ $125 for three lots
who had gardens and livestock
drank from Tanner’s Spring
addenda and provisos of course
who was a laborer a waiter a shoemaker
who stood for baptisms
and burials
Black history is American
history
upon whose hearts and hands
the expenses will fall
upheld by the bludgeons
—see Chavez Ravine
see Dawes
see Techwood: the maps!
the maps all bob-
tailed, cut off
at the bottom, Niskey Lake
erased, Cascade Heights
by neither accident nor consequence
who fled to Sandy Ground
to Skunk Hollow
without plates in what was called the Gothic pattern
without quite a few pieces
of porcelain a comb a roasting pan
a smoking pipe a toothbrush
a leveled hill
Lopate, Phillip. Waterfront. Crown Publishers, 2004.
Drusus, Livius. “Seneca Village: When New York City Destroyed a Thriving Black Community To Make Way for Central Park.” Mental Floss, 15 April 2015.
Gustafson, Seth. “Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta 1990–1996.” Southeastern Geographer, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2013.
Lalwani, Mona, et al. “The lost neighborhood under New York’s Central Park.” Vox Video <https://youtu.be/HdsWYOZ8iqM>, 2020.
∩
Originally from Southern California, Glenn Bach now lives in the Doan Brook watershed of Cleveland, Ohio. Glenn retired from a career in sound art and experimental music to focus exclusively on Atlas, a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Excerpts have appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, jubilat, and Plumwood Mountain; sequence-length excerpts include cricket (eclipse) (Stone Corpse Press, 2024) and verdugos (Ghost City Press, 2024). Glenn documents his work at glennbach.com and @AtlasCorpus.