“It’s surprising just how chilling it can be to see a small area of fresh
grass and trees.”
“Knowing that there were dozens of tents pitched there a week ago?”
“Yes. All those people, swept away in that police sweep that was so widely
touted and so widely celebrated, everybody rejoicing in the big police sweep
that was going to sweep the nasty unhoused population away, sweep, sweep,
sweep.”
“Yes. It gives you a taste of what it feels like to see the results of
genocide.”
“There. That’s exactly what I was thinking. This tidy, ever-so-appealing space,
rendered clean and neat,
with no trace left of what was there before to trouble the minds of people
visiting. Someone arriving from out of town, who didn’t know the camp had been
there, would have no idea that the unhoused people had even existed.”
“Even knowing that the people who lived here aren’t dead, that they
were just kicked out and hustled off down the road, doesn’t make that much
difference. They’ve been erased from where they were, from where they were
living.”
“It’s not as though they wanted to live in squalor,
shivering in filthy tents in the middle of Winter in Oregon. But they were
here.”
“And now they’re gone, and there’s no trace of their existence.”
“An imperfection, down the memory hole.”
“There are plaques all over town, commemorating historic events. There
should be more of them, marking even things that people don’t want to remember.”
“I remember hearing about a group in California putting up markers
in honor of bordellos and speakeasies, but a group recording the former
locations of encampments, yes. I like it.”
Today’s prompt, “imperfections, comes from the poem, “Palimpsest”,
by Thomas R. Moore: https://tmoore419.wixsite.com/poet
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Nothing to see here."
