buffalo

buffalo is this mighty
morbidly blobby
mess of misconceptions and
mistaken faces, meaning that if it were a human i wouldn't mind running into her on the street, because she'd smile and say hello and give me the unasked for time of day, and then she'd cry. it's a city they tried and tried to make safe but people continued to run from it. it's a place where race was always first, sex second, and everything else last, where respect continued to try to run at the toes of those white people and eventually gave up.
buffalo feels like the scraping shock of a crash
while it asks,
who are you?
who do you want me to be?
and people keep telling it different answers. some tell it that they want its industry to begin to blossom and make the city sexy. some say that to heal buffalo's disease can be healed when the communities inside it are moisturized to reduce fault lines of centuries-old hatred with a smile and a tip of the hat. some think that it needs to simply regurgitate what is causing the symptoms.