by Harrison Nuzzo

This man here didn’t used to stand on

the island
in the middle of this

intersection urban sprawl

the city will reach you, you will move

further and further and it will

reach

to sprawl
spreawlian
to move convulsively

the straggling expansion of built-up districts into surrounding countryside

the mountains as long as I can remember

the ones that build up to Black Mountain

they are being eroded
NO NO
not by the rain we

we
we don’t get

enough of that here

it is the humans

eroded by the money

here I am
looking up from the bottom of
this not so
green valley where lush grasses line our sidewalks and the trees aren’t always palms
and the children cannot walk
to school on
these massive five lane wide streets

everything is fit not for us,
it’s for
the come and goers

that

come and go and come and go and

they consume the dessert we consume the lake

///

She is still there on that corner
I had never noticed the dog
before

a stumpy legged little dachshund
I can tell by the way he walks , he is old

and weary
he might be young though I know
he is old

a weathered little fella struggling through his day as she shakes a cup at
those who pass, no one will ever stop for her and him
if the light is green, and
the light always seems to be GREEN
///

it rained this morning
it doesn’t rain enough
that made it humid
giving the heat something to hold on to the humidity was gone by mid-morning

I felt it dissipate
as I pass the abandoned apartment complex

cordoned off with toxic yellow tape
soon to be knocked down

they’ll build another one and charge even more per unit
they always do

development
always developing
this city is always growing housing market
housing market! HOUSING MARKET!

everyone is moving here from California

-------

Walking is difficult

in this city

he has been walking since the early morning,

the bars let out at 3am
and he lost his wallet

the night before / that morning

nuclear yellow haze
lit by an eastern sun sluggishly lifting from the streets and dispersing its- self into the air

tourists walking back to their hotels

he moves like a flâneur
he has nowhere to be

not yet

the night still swirling in his mind
...a headache

◼ a mother with a stroller, conducting
a flock of kids ducklings waddling there are liquor stores and gun stores

and convenient stores where is the nearest place to get
, some lettuce

some tomatoes
some corn, anything all she can afford
is dusty corn-ish chips

and ramen that isn’t ramen and peanut butter and on a good day some jelly
ducklings waddling toward the
crosswalk opposite
she is guiding them toward school
where they
can get their free breakfast of microwaved eggs on a Styrofoam tray with musty hash- browns and sugary chocolate milk
in a food desert,
in a desert...
a desert...
this desert is,
intentional

he put out
a cigarette with a flick like a shorting light bulb

and made sure to smile at
her
as she passed

◼ a man lying on the side walk blissful
hands behind his head

eyes on the cloudless sky sun creeping across - a bacchian
grin on his face he rolls on

to his side
with the swiftness of a child tumbling down
a steep
grassy knoll spare a cig

brother man he isn’t quite lucid;

he stopped to stare at the
busty mannequins in the window

on the corner
of Casino Center and Colorado with the studded thongs and the leashes around their slim necks and those high- waisted hot-pants hiked up to that sinched waist terrified by the possibility of beauty, while forgetting what
it might
be
...slowly
losing
life

MAN LEAVES DOGS IN CAR WHILE 118F OUTSIDE
One dog dies, other taken to animal hospital.
Yesterday at the Walmart on the corner of Eastern Ave. and Serene a 46yo man left his two pugs in the car while he spent over an hour in the Walmart. The windows were up and the car was off. By the time the police arrived one of the dogs was deceased. The other is in critical condition in an animal hospital. The man, not named, has been arrested for negligence.

Where have all these green spaces come from, they were not here too long ago. New green spaces, in this city we have no time for green everything is tan, brown, rocky, firm, no luscious grasses should appear for many miles.

Frolic, in the green spaces as doe after a hot rain
but we have no doe, or deer, where have the deer come from, there are not supposed to be any deer around here.
They would not survive like the burros do, they do
not have the constitution of the goats near the lake.

-------

Fabrication, we, everything, all, fabricated. We Create things.
TURBULANCE! SEE>>>look there LOOK!

SEE!
PLANES>>>all the planes coming in

Full of those damn come and goers Coming and going and creating

This turbulence In the sky

Caused by the uneven heating of the Earths surface and it is always hot here Always hot and uneven, never even...

This, this
Creates turbulence, on the ground
The ground shakes when the planes land with all the guys that think

all we are in HOOKERS & BLOW -------

If we can’t have something we
build our own,
you can go from Paris to Venice in about

15 minutes,
shit,
you can walk there, we can paint
the sky blue
and fill the streets with water,
we can steal the sphinx and
make it our own
and even build glass pyramids resistant
to stone,
have gladiators
fight again in the colosseum and adventure with pirates,

if we can’t have it we will build it
we always have, we can’t even have the desert, but here

we are, taking the desert, no one
walks with a
cool body anymore here, the come and goers are always too hot, they come here to spend their money and do the things they can’t do at home

they come here to cheat on their partners and blow all their savings and vomit

in the morning and
all for what?
To give Steve Wynn
a few more buks
and go home to complain about how broke Vegas made them

but im going back next year!

Harrison Nuzzo is an MFA candidate at UNLV. He is involved with food desert reclamation in the Las Vegas valley through a new non-profit being started by the head of the landscape architecture college, Lisa Ortega.