Dave Bonta's short poem is a lament for a neighborhood changing under the pressure of gentrification. The speaker says "we mourn the city / and we mourn the street," and the plain repetition feels like a group sharing grief. The opening lines are odd and tangled. Mourning is dressed up in comparisons to "a clock or an auditor," things that are cold, exact, and official. That suggests grief here is not loud or theatrical but dry and formal, as if loss has been reduced to bookkeeping.
The poem's sharpest moment is "the change of a great place / into money." A place people loved is turned into a number. The final image, "some strange fit / of tooth on tooth," is harder to pin down, but it suggests clenched jaws, grinding teeth, or pieces locking together uneasily. The mood is tight, bitter, and restrained: anger and sadness held in rather than shouted.