By Alula Hunsen
Students trample over history through a wide, forgiving intersection;
Locals way-find and stray off abused routes towards less-driven lanes—a child, for instance, cuts hard to avoid Mass Ave, opting for a skip down Main.
Memorial Drive swings you East, eliding institutes to introduce shopping malls, open plazas, and small pocket parks;
skaters fill Lynch, and Eggs Park on the other side of the scene,
grown men cracking their vertebrae for clips like fiends while BMX bikers emerge from ramps and bowls with legs a-splay
Kendall comprises coldness—a clinical coordination of commuters across crosswalks while pedestrians with cross faces cut consterned glances at folks of concentrated color;
alienation and hypervisibility abound as cameras capture our countenances and surveil us as prey
Private green lands abound in the evil empire, manicured hedges manufactured by horticulturists at odd hours as ground falls fallow to dollars and
Industry begets industry as our institutional landlords implement price hikes and imbricate parcels for biotech and software sprawl.
So let’s cut northwest and enter the Port at a jog, shoes plodding and stomping like a swung kick drum on a D’Angelo song
Youthfulness mucks about the interior streets as the afternoon hours approach, bikes busying about as playgrounds fill
Aspiring artists, architects, gear heads, engineers, lucid dreamers, and future putrid pols fill the pews in a strip of tea bars and cafés,
Devout career-builders find free moments to connect over frustration before they hop and trudge to the bus stop,
gripping bars and handles to prevent momentum sway.
A seminary up near Broadway brings brothers and sisters into sacred space to honor the words of prophets and angels, before Allah they genuflect to pray,
heads and shoulders turned southeast towards Mecca, our feet follow their worship as we make our way
Prospect runs into Western Ave and River Street, cleaving Cambridgeport from Riverside, where Sly cuts heads and Cambridge houses its public
Community centers commit their commoners to courses, feed families, educate the earnest, provide pre-adolescents property to play
The kids fulfill spectra and quota as they grow to adulthood, as their city grows in love and geography while under watchful gaze
Uniformed operatives circle Central Square to keep loiterers, Black and brown youth, and the unhoused on edge in mental disarray
Mere yards astray from City Hall and the Post Office, blocks from the public library, a brisk stroll south of CRLS; the state’s productive and reductive apparatuses on full display
We press past and push feet against pavement and pick up the pace
Folks got cans to shake, stickers to paste, chants to echo on solo missions towards the end of genocide while weapons manufacturers sit blocks away
This might be where our commute concludes (I gotta make some personal pit stops and politick with some homies so we can stay in-tune); but forthcoming soon, potentially a part two to address the tendrils of settlement in Harvard and the towering facades of Alewife with a tad bit of delay.
Alula Hunsen (he/him) is an editor working with the Boston Ujima Project on building narratives toward liberatory urban futures. For more of Alula’s work, see his personal website.