Shoreham Yards: Notes on the Periphery

Elisabeth Workman

Observations at the edges of a truck and trainyard complex in Northeast Minneapolis

This is the second in a series on the Shoreham Repository, and is a new addition to the archive compiled and curated by Gudrun Lock in the Special Collections at the Minneapolis Central Library.

North

Underneath an anonymous sky
the creaking and hissing of train cars   
in rearrangement 
intermodal drone	 birdsong
manifold	slow drumming
in the sewer	smoky sulfur
prismatic green	

I saw that at Shoreham Yards. 

Artemisia absinthium	Artemisia
vulgaris 		mugwort the mother
wormwood’s silver hands write wordwort
gypsum  pistons	yellow powders   peat
hidden city of freight
in the land of the fraught

“The round earth 
on flat paper”

Mullein plantain thistle rail
car false creeper train truck buck
thorn petroleum pulp the future 
is in plastics prairie ash tar coal alkali
acid  slag debris the promiscuous dump
of this nature poem

Far off a freight car being dropped 
(feel it beneath my feet)
ripples outward

A mushroom–as if an engorged golfball
banished from the golf course across the street–
gives everything love   	you can
just tell 
say I saw that 
at Shoreham Yards.

A sign reading AZZ Industries
invites further consideration
 Is this azzhole of America forever
How many azzholes can there be
like inverted seraphim 
holes where once were eyes to see

Grief dissipates in the green
but the effects of the yards
the miles of booms and rumbles are 
somehow sci-fi or mythic

Did the Titans play with blocks like this
before they baited young Dionysus 
with a ball all to tear him apart
I feel absurd and want to love
everything too	all of these pieces
colors    poisons 	    augurs

South

Many layers of bird song
“The basic question is whether 
chance is blind”
A jangly muffler
A drunk warbler
cardinals robins the somewhere
hum of an AC window unit
bright shimmers and rust
I heard at Shoreham Yards

Petrichor over capitalcore
plus vague hot 
dogs plus a house 
fire many years since
mulberries vs. impermanence

What is the feeling that is
nostalgia without affection
dutifully pedestrian
blood purple
What is wrong with me
to not yearn 
for this

EAST

Doppler continuum of traffic 
mechanical pulsations
ventricle  out from the train
rolling into the yard
violent and ordinary
the color you smell
when you hear 
the word blur

By the little city of the dead
I smell weed as my dad would say
No he would say grass
A city bus sighs 
then a cloud of meat
roasting at Prime Market
& Deli	corn tortillas
a little later on

Here’s an entrance
Congrats Dr. Haveland
on your beautiful baby
girl! Intermodal Traffic
Only. Turbo Tim loves 
Cats.	Hunt 
the merge(r)	Feel 
grief or green.	Mechanical 
tragedy	the way the repressed
always eventually leaks out 
e.g. America

The graveyard next to the stacked
freight cars like houses takes me
to the crypts in New Orleans 
A friend texts with news
of a miscarriage. Shoreham:
“An apocalyptic alternative cast
by lot”		“the whole outward world
with all its being…”
 Interdimensional, intermercurial
“...is a signature of the inward”
containment
contaminate

WEST

Cologne from a passing car
tent village   	AI 	thistles
as large as the smallest fireworks
Signs of civilization: the faces 
of realtors and personal injury
lawyers. We Are Nuts.
Here is where I wander
off course	entranced
by a cinematic bridge 
(somehow Mad Max)
with a raptor soundtrack

Off course looks so much
like it could be on course
one  syllabus of Shoreham Yards
the severity of infrastructure
and distant clamour of  alienated excess.
Is this timeline jumping? Calamity?

“The basic question, the question
is that of divining, glimpsing”
Of course I stray
from the instructions and feel
ok      sheepish         tired
I think of my dad 
in this moment of getting
lost	the wandering he has become
prone to in his dementia. 
How the other Sunday he said:
“If you have a question
in your body
walk it out.”

In memory of Chuck Workman, 11/8/44 – 12/1/24.

Quoted passages are drawn from Ronald Johnson’s The Book of the Green Man and Dale Pendell’s The Language of Birds.