from Lordstown Syndrome

“Path” by Karl Zuehlke

Syndrome/Theatre

for safe keeping, empty the architecture               on the next
generation:               U P T O W N: the letters          

drive their metal into            nothing nothing the dark sky 
of Market         the daughter of 

Murray ben Moshe v’Rivka   who can’t afford 
to see a theater a marquee              once electric with neon

designed to be noticed at 45     mph so the flash would bend 
across the dash oh naked     branches phone wires  

run ragged, yellow                   the leaves cutting the wind up: now
what alphabet crowds the mind        the marquee letters filed

A to cardinal-red        punctuations, a richness of        
As, only one Q                         to spell out        

the most fantastic titles             a country could come
up with: to backlight   an alphabet is generative, now 

to stand so slowly        beneath something meant quickly:        
what slows what catches            potholes, commas 

For those who were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most vivid past involved the forty years of decline that followed the closings. Deindustrialization did not displace them. It defined them.

—Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (2018)

I walk past the demolished bar on West Federal 
where my parents met. For them,
it was the Agora, and before them,

the State Theater. For those after me, an empty
lot. When I say “Lordstown Syndrome,”
I am not saying I’m the reporter who coined the phrase

or a worker holding a LOCAL 1112
ON STRIKE sign off I-80. I’m saying that 
when my generation walks through rubble, we know 

what we’re walking through: the syndrome’s
syndrome, its aftermath hung-
over—its postindustrial

post-ness. Our awareness isn’t much to offer, 
and I only ask that my version of it, dilapidated
and unrecognizable, be accepted

as when cantors recite the Hineini
and ask that their prayer be accepted
despite its shortfalls. You wouldn’t recognize it now, 

my temple, but growing up, services were full, 
and the cantor, a giant man,
would begin Hineini at the back

and recite it up to the bimah. It would start
so quietly that no one would recognize
its starting, but slowly, everyone turned

back to where he began
in Hebrew: Here I am, poor in deeds,
trembling and apprehensive

and with each step, it’d grow
louder: I have come to stand before you
and plead. I was a child,  

and he was terrifying, like death itself
approaching. The cantor, of course,
wouldn’t see himself 

in my remembrance. This is what I mean 
by Lordstown Syndrome: it wouldn’t see itself
in my remembrance. But let me put it

this way: do you think another generation
was driven past that factory
for no reason

but to be told do you see how big it is—
how it keeps 
going?

ABOUT THE Author

Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab, 2017), a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and Poppy Seeds, winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, POETS.org, The New Republic, and elsewhere. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Karl Zuehlke is an artist, translator, and teacher. His artwork has appeared in The Penn Review, Adroit Journal, Reed Magazine, Tint, and elsewhere.