Concrete is meant to be the last word on a piece of ground, the thing poured over every argument. Dave Bonta's "Poem for Display in a Vacant Lot" gives it a longing instead. The slab in the poem dreams, wants, and hopes to be loved. What it dreams of is the very life that is breaking it apart.
The first stanza is a catalogue, and the plant names do much of the work. "Bindweed & beggar-tick, / burdock & wineberry" is a pleasure to say, with its repeated b sounds, and the names also describe behaviour: bindweed binds, beggar-tick begs, burdock clings. The ampersands keep the list loose and unceremonious, as if the weeds were crowding onto the page. Then the list turns darker. "Gravid mosquito mothers" and "copperheads" bring in pregnancy, venom and biting, and the stanza ends on its best image, "a wild rose / equipped with grappling hooks." The rose is traditionally the flower of love, but here it comes with climbing gear, an invader scaling a wall.
The second stanza explains the dream in the plainest language in the poem. "The concrete wants to be loved, / not merely walked upon" is almost comic, a lonely pavement with a wounded ego. The wish is then fulfilled through the weeds' own tricks. Burrs and seeds cling to a "pants leg" and hitch a ride home, and a mosquito or a thorn takes "a bite / your skin will remember." Being loved, for concrete, means leaving a mark. The poem treats scratches and bites as a kind of intimacy, and that makes the vacant lot oddly tender as well as threatening.
In the third stanza the voice turns to "we" and to the past tense. "It wasn't supposed to be this way" sounds like a rueful shrug. The language of the stanza is the language of ownership: concrete as a "gift," the land as "unimproved," the idea of "condescend[ing]" to save a little "open space." The poem is quietly mocking this vocabulary. A gift nobody asked for, and a judgment that woods and weeds need improving, expose the arrogance behind the pouring. The stanza also spills over its own edge. "Open space" ends the third stanza, and "a light-green stripe across the grid" begins the fourth, so the green stripe is squeezed into the gap between stanzas, just as parkland is squeezed between streets.
The last stanza shifts to the present: the pavement "begins to bulge open." The tone hardens into dry wit with "There are no motels in this vacancy." It plays on the "No Vacancy" sign, and it is also a deadpan point that even the lowest, most disposable kind of building has not reached this lot. The final image is "The flag of our alienation / goes down to kudzu." A flag suggests claiming territory, and "alienation" names the real cost of the claim, which is separation from the living ground. Kudzu, a vine known for smothering whatever it climbs, covers the flag. "Goes down" works two ways, as a flag lowered in surrender and as something sinking out of sight.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is that of speech rather than of metre. Each stanza has six lines, a tidy block that the poem's content then undermines. Lines are short and often broken at moments of suspense ("or at least take a bite / your skin will remember"), so that the small shock lands at the line end. The title adds one more layer. It suggests a sign or placard, so the poem pretends to be a notice posted on the lot itself, an odd and funny address to the empty ground.
The poem is significant because it reverses the usual picture. Normally we imagine nature as passive and fragile, waiting to be paved or protected. Here the pavement is the one that is needy and cracking, and the weeds are agile, armed and patient. The poem does not scold. It is playful and clear-eyed, and it leaves the reader with an uncomfortable thought: the "improved" land may be only temporarily ours.