Knar Gavin
EARTH, ltd.
the carrion capacity of the earth
is limited
so let’s not mince
words, taut
meats of our
solidarity:
no one is illegal
free them all
AFTER THE WEDGE
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: The War is the first and only thing in the world today.
It’s true he said
that thing
about the
poem.
OK,
little
(or big)
machinists,
have at it!
But that wasn’t
the opener, and
to every machine
its milieu. Like
how capitalism
is so very
accommodating,
how any new
invention necessitates it
(a new war).*
*This line is grifting off Marshal McLuhan: “Every new technology necessitates a new war.”
AGAINST IMPROVEMENT: to ward an all-ours make/shift that makes-do
JOHN ADAMS: The buildings and the Water, I wanted very much.
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE: Eia for those who never invented anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never conquered anything
Infrastructure always
flirts with the historical
until realizing it’s merely being used —
often to hide all the bodies.
Curse the tech fix bros and girl bosses; curse
tweak Armageddon, which
is already here.¹
.
I am ready
for the post-auto
mobile world: the make
shift garage and the toolshed.
It’ll be a communal thing,
an iterative nonce structure
to yield differently,
continuously misshapen
and re-socialized
in the and then
of again.
Eia for love
Eia for joy
Eia for grief and its udders of reincarnated tears.²
¹ This term is draw from abolitionist and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
² Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
COP CITY WILL NEVER BE BUILT: a song for Tortuguita
RUTH WILSON GILMORE: “Practice makes different.”
It’s the only poem I want to write.
From Philly to Atlanta, we won’t miss the City in the Forest,
Won’t say goodbye to the Meadows, nor sunset those heritage trees.
Our name is blockade; is hurling praxes and making different.
It’s high time to rise where they’ve stood all along.
To refuse refuse; condemn the wasting processes of the state.
I’m thinking again of Diane di Prima: you have a poetics, you step into the world.
You can step into the world!
A tree is a tender place—a place you can tend to sit, to stay!
Bread and butter, jam en jamb.
There’s a stride we’ve got to hit, so fists up.
The Atlanta Police Foundation wants us to STFU with our ACAB & fuck12,
But care is not a crime, nor tree-sitting, terror.
We know what the APF is all about:
they want only yeses.
“Yes” to the IOF, to climate collapse and cages;
to green colonialism and borders, fire fighter foam
in our watersheds; yes to brigades around every pipeline
and the organization of abandonment.
But to all of the green
gentrifiers with their foot soldiers and fortresses.
To all the general contractors
who would build those impermeable concrete paths
girdling the urban war school, its waste running off.
To all the moneys bags and Hollywood execs
readying to prep those 5Ks on APF-manicured trails.
You can hop back on those treadmills;
heave those money bags into the sea.
There is no way, plumber, baker teacher—no way
you cannot have a poetics, so no more cop shit and adjuncting for the elites.
We’re here to make and take back a world of and for breath.
Here for the forest and against customs and the police:
Cop city will never be built.
Knar (they/any) is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and they recently completed their doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. A community defense and environmental justice organizer, Temple prof, and endurance wanderer, Knar lives on unceded Lenni-Lenape lands in so-called Philadelphia. They are the author of Vela. (the Operating System) and recent writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Ballast, Etc., Denver Quarterly, AGNI, the Journal, NiCHE, and Environmental History Now.