How We Saved the City

To belong to ownership: a twist too neat for inverse. The signs are going up everywhere, like rabbits along the highway. Looking around, we see them. Root the birds' -nest fungi out of the aloe pot. Humble underpinnings, that desire has. Safe to own: the warp in your board, meld in your corner, to set your windows in. We should hang out our shingle: one kind of math or another done here. Every tenant's shingle should be out. The floor slopes from its hump. Time paid for by the wet trees that surround us explains the difference between "fewer" and "less." Properties. And less. Ownership links and sets through the city, puts on, shrugs off. Shuns and shuts out the bleared opposite.




Architecture supports each moment financially, moments that could be floating their independence over bridges. So say borrowed dwellers, tender more (weirdly, mathematically) to some moments than others. Not dream-logic but of the dream house, it proceeds, we can state about it. A waterdrop changes the shapes of everything nearby through reflection, not accuracy, just reflection. It isn't a true mirror or a rear-view or a mugger's mirror or the one James found on garbage night, big as me, with carven frame. All over the city in the waterdrop members members of a privileged group rise early and snap at their husbands.




The belief that ownership will save the city qualifies, comes under the heading, or falls. It's like saying that slow dreamlike boats piloted by mimes will, or dirty Valkyries on bikes. It's like going without saying to a city made of wood, PVC pipe and brick, bundles of hair that used to be rats and tax forms and windows that can't be saved, this way: teetering on the lip of preservation. Sill of surface tension. City snapped at that moment. The key on rent day sears the hand, the office cools me by name, i hand over my math. Posters up for the New Urbanism, olive- and rust-colored friendly fire. Blades of fans that fall with a crash for no reason, or a rented wind. Apartment like paid silence, house, an alibi. Fewer lots, but less time.


Safe as Houses by Kate Schapira

in A Sing Economy