What I do now as a lawyer is, I help to run a program called Su
Clínica Legal.
Su Clínica Legal is a legal services program for low-income
tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Chelsea is a tough little town, right across the Tobin Bridge
from Boston.
It is the poorest town in Massachusetts.
And it's about 40% Latino now--
Puerto Rican, Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan--
and requires a lot of Spanish-speaking legal
services, in the housing area.
One night, I couldn't sleep.
I was thinking about the clients, people
who had passed through my office,
have passed through that courthouse.
And I wrote the following poem, which
is the controversial title poem of the book
that Norton is going to publish next year.
It's called "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, Chelsea,
Massachusetts."
"I cannot evict them from my insomniac nights,
tenants in the city of coughing and dead radiators.
They bang the radiators like cold, hollow marimbas.
They cry out to unseen creatures skittering across their feet
in darkness.
They fold hands over plates to protect food from ceilings
black with roaches.
And they answer the call of the list.
All evictions in court, brays the clerk.
Quiet and dutiful as spectral troops
returning, they file into the courtroom,
crowding the gallery.
The patient one from El Salvador, shoemakers union
refugee, slapping his neck to show
where that vampire of an army bullet
pierced his uncle's windpipe.
The red haired woman with no electricity but the drugs heat,
swimming in the pools of her blue bruises, white skin
as the candle she lives by, who will
move this afternoon for $100.
The prostitute swollen with pregnancy and sobbing,
as the landlady sneers miscarriage before a judge
poking his broken hearing aid.
The girls surrounded by a pleading carousel of children,
in Spanish bewilderment, sleepless and rat
vigilant, who wins reluctant extermination,
but loses the youngest, lead paint retarded.
The man, alcohol-puffed, graph of scars stretching
across his belly, locked out, shirt stolen,
arrested at the hearing for the rampage
of his detox hallucinations.
The Guatemalan boy, who listens through the wall
for his father's landlord defiant staccato,
jolted awake by flashes of the landlord floating
over the bed, parade balloon waving a kitchen knife.
For all those sprawl downstairs with the work
boots crusted map printed on the back,
the creases of the judge's face collapse into a fist.
As we shut files and click briefcases to leave,
a loud faced man trumpets from the gallery.
Death to legal aid."
Well, there's a happy little poem.
A joyous poem for the holiday season.
I am available for children's parties, by the way.
[LAUGHTER]