Urban Renewal

Here you see billboards bolted onto new-construction,
trendy townhomes, tall and narrow;
dormant smokestacks taller still:
new money's retribution on the methods of the old.

And so we are told, in matters of taste and modernity, the members
of La Gormandine's nine a.m. line are second to none
(same goes for the buns).

Yet technicians at home belie barons abroad,
presiding over cobalt, lithium mines,
and nickel, and so many virtual nickels and dimes cross the counters here,
and you’d never know a thing about it.

We paint the stacks with foliage,
psychedelic, soaring toucans tangerine
to mask the memory of fumes now belched somewhere else—
somewhere gladly out of the way.
The chipper residents can claim the core has been perfected;
boast of bicycle frames lithium laden,
or billboards that inveigh the fuddy-duddy slant
of fogies who would stamp the stench of cannabis as something untoward:
new money's retribution on the manners of the old.

Beyond the core and far away
in Elyria peripheral,
yellow clumps fall like rain,
drop upon the children,
drop from the sky like canaries
dropping dead in yesterday's mines.

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J. Kramer Hare is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lives and writes. When not reading or writing he enjoys rock climbing and listening to jazz. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jerry Jazz Musician, Untenured, Quibble Lit, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Clackamas Literary Review, the Oakland Review, and elsewhere. He can be found at kramerpoetry.com.