I’m on my West Side porch building a snowman trying to celebrate the Bills clinching the division but there are at least two confirmed deaths right now and probably more in the coming days so many without power, others stranded in vehicles on impassable roads, everybody stuck in the cold I’m also thinking about how this is my first Christmas without my dad, how his lungs walked off the job how my mom’s been crying reliving his death while listening to WBEN on the little red transistor radio because she heard this story about a guy with COPD trapped in his home and his oxygen is running out when I finish my snowman, I pick up a blown off branch and write 17 on his cold chest I shout, “Josh Allen please save us” at the blizzard at the power grid at everything that makes us weep and feel unalive then the wind hugs me a little too tightly and I can hear snow globes all across Western New York cracking open, how I imagine that mural on Main Street coming to life Josh Allen with a goat’s head stiff-arming a Green Bay player how Josh hops off the wall and begins stiff-arming storm clouds away from Buffalo, a warming shelter on two legs running from Northtowns to Southtowns melting snow delivering insulin and filling gas tanks it’s important to believe in something in anything, how when we’re down and out we have to improvise to make it through any storm it’s what we do here, we stiff-arm until we’re right where we need to be when I come to, I head back inside my mom has stopped crying and is now wearing that little red transistor radio around her neck she looks relieved apparently, a neighbor rescued that guy with COPD “I’m so glad he’s gonna be okay,” she tells me as we hug it feels like a resurrection I head to the kitchen to brew some coffee and when it’s ready, I don’t drink it at first I just smell it because it makes me think of morning how even darkness must pass, and a new day will come how flowers always know when to bloom how we must always remember those flowers that won’t be able to once I’m caffeinated, I’m outside again surveying the wreckage when this teenager walks by the house clutching a shovel, he points it at me like we’ve all been chosen and says, “We gotta do what we can” I look at Josh Allen the snowman and it’s like he’s smiling at me, at all of us let’s just say it doesn’t matter how many frostbitten diamonds this Christmas blizzard drops onto our neighborhoods because in our Buffalo hearts there are never any downed powerlines there’s always an electric flow of empathy and when the going gets tough, we help each other out mixtapes with roots that never end because we share the same stiff-arming song: the city of good neighbors
This poem was was inspired by wheatpaste artwork of Josh Allen (The GOAT), stiff-arming a Green Bay Packers player | Photo by Glenn Murray