Graffiti Artists
By Andrea L. Fry
The authorities will start with shame—the lecture on personal property
as if it would reform. But not even close—the claim of ownership is as alien
to ghost writers, as the acceptance of defacement is to those who own.
But how persistent, how alive the calling card! Yesterday, the overpass
was grey and mournful in the sleet. Today it’s neon orange, bedazzled
in fun fonts, spiky electric blue shapes like speech bubbles in comics.
It’s hard not to smile at exuberance. That treacherous cliff behind
Friendly’s? They washed it in purple, then sent a red zigzag down
the rockface, chubby letters cartwheeling into a vermillion pool of LOVE.
But who are these stealthy anarchists? How do they shimmy up with cans,
spray billows of perfect clouds while dangling like spiders from a thread?
I can only dream of such courage. I’ve spent my life trying to get a mortgage.
If I ever do, I wonder if I’ll join the owners, put up a fence of cypress trees,
install a rumbling garage door capable of decapitating trespassers?
When “Stoney Creek Road” was changed to “Stoned Creek Road,”
my father used it as a teaching moment on vandalism—he must have heard
us chuckling in the back. I can’t help but root for these mischief artists.
And how injurious is their havoc, when governments dispense with lives
as casually as these sprayers paint a rock? They say King Charles III
owns 1/6 the surface area of the planet. Imagine waking up in a London
fog to a golden dispatch stretched across Westminster Bridge:
Andrea Fry has published two collections of poetry, The Bottle Diggers, in 2017 (Turning Point Press) and Poisons & Antidotes (Deerbrook Editions) in 2021. Her poems have appeared or will appear in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Annals of Internal Medicine,Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stanford Literary Review, The Sun, and Women’s Review of Books among others. She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Andrea is freshly retired from her career as an oncology nurse practitioner and lives in Brookline, MA with her husband and two comical felines. Visit her website at andrealfry.com.
Photo quisnovus via a Creative Commons license.
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