26 Apr The Buffalo You Left by Joe Hall
from steps, you hurried down into the
churning stream of sidewalks, of course
so many cities fall away when you leave, everything you needed
the city to be may stop bending to the light, a planet
thirsty for light, a tangle of threads, pulling
the fabric of the city: I wish I could describe
Buffalo’s weather like some soft container
that invites you to hold with care an intricate and accurate
machine, tiny gears flying, but all the Buffalos
have left with you or have knots loosened
into threads held by everyone who knew you better,
and even if all the people you collected came together
part of this city is gone, gone, not
regained, we are struck with grief, it’s just grief,
grief calls to the bitter enamel of some
day, grief brings no one back,
not you, eating an image of yourself carved from salt,
though salt is not nothing, carving
itself into the slowly parting streets,
pothole chasing pothole.
About the Poet
photo credit Lianna Hogan
Joe Hall is the author of six books: Buffalo Free Rapid Transit (Black Ocean, 2026); People Finder, Buffalo (Cloak, 2024); Fugue and Strike (Black Ocean, 2023); Someone’s Utopia (Black Ocean, 2018); The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean, 2013); and Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean, 2010).
With Chad Hardy, he co-authored The Container Store Vols I & II (2012). With Cheryl Quimba, he co-authored the chapbook May I Softly Walk (2014). Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and/or rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. He participates in Hostile Books, a publishing collective dedicated to radical materiality, with Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong.
Hall is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Bonaventure University. He has taught community based creative writing workshops through the Worker Center in Buffalo and Just Buffalo Literary Center. His college teaching experience includes all levels of undergraduate creative writing and environmental literature. He is frequently amazed by his students.
In 2018, Hall received a PhD in Literature from the University at Buffalo, SUNY upon completion of his dissertation on liquid commons in eighteenth-century literature. The Journal of Post Colonial Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction have published his articles on literature, water, waste, and imperialism. His essays and reviews have appeared in Annulet, Terrain.org, The Colorado Review, and Fence Digital. His current research project involves settler colonial aesthetics in modern American ecopoetics.
Related Event
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- On Friday, May 1 at 7:30 p.m. Fitz Books & Waffles will host the Book Release Party for Joe Hall’s new full-length collection of poems, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit (Black Ocean Books, 2026) with friends and artists Patrick Cray, Amy De’Ath, Jake Reber, and Cheryl Quimba reading and/or performing in celebration of the book launch.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.