Kevin Coval

Falling Up: A Call to Arms
(RIP Sole UAC)

the factory he was painting on
used to manufacture paint. tomb
stone for the industrial age near
the stevenson express way, along
the south branch of the Chicago river.

Pilsen, Little Village, used to be
Back of the Yards, giant butcher
in the center of the country.

cops gave chase in an abandoned building.
whose interests were they serving. the city
didn’t protect the bodies working
while the factory smoked.

the building is a heap of grey rot.

graffiti artists tribute the hands
that sealed paint cans. conjurers
bringing life back.

graffiti writers are superheroes
who astound and scale the possible,
who defy gravity, who commemorate
and communicate in secret codes.

graffiti writers are the recorders
of a city rotting. painters of walls,
resisters of death and dying industry.

graffiti writers Upton Sinclair,
journalists investigating the g-d-
forsaken with aerosol.

graffiti writers can’t fly.

when Sole jumped off the roof
of the empty building, he thought
he could swim, maybe thought
the river would break his fall
and it did
break him
maybe.
or maybe
the ghosts of the river
held him there. great leviathans
disporting themselves in the depths *
of bubbly creek. there is
no oxygen in the water.
bloodworms feast on sunken
organs buried in the riverbed,
corpses slaughtered in the stockyard
decomposing for decades, entrails
and industry, the hands of workers
pushed out of job and home.

Sole choose to be free
Under A Crown, United Artists,
Crew of the working. he was
twenty-six, a year into marriage,
recently laid off. a city worker
remembering the left out, the margins
and maimed, the garnished wages
and real income of regular people,
in this city on a lake, plummeting
like stone off a roof top, a body
from the heavens, Sole falling
in the Chicago River
where workers and remnants
of slaughter disturb the water
bubble up, and sometimes
catch fire and burn.



* Upton Sinclair (1906). The Jungle. Chapter 9.