Poem: "Urban Renewal"

This will be the first in a series of posts highlighting my published poems. First up is "Urban Renewal," which I began composing while walking through Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood on the way to the bouldering gym. It is a part of the city in which I enjoy spending time, and I relish that my gym's location gives me such frequent occasion to do so. There are good restaurants and coffee shops to be found, along with several boutiques which are generally out of my price range but nevertheless make for good window shopping. On the day "Urban Renewal" began to take shape, I was struck by the ways in which Lawrenceville is emblematic of the history of the city, from the smog-laden steel town where Fifth Avenue's finest sourced their wealth to the marginally trendy tech and healthcare center it is today.
"Urban Renewal" was first published in Issue 57 of Uppagus. Follow the link to read it. Below is a sample of the first few lines.
Here you see billboards bolted onto new construction,
trendy townhomes, tall and narrow;
dormant smokestacks taller still:
new money's retribution on the methods of the old...
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