Witness Poems: On Premature Death Among the Unhoused by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 

Introduction for Doing Modernity

Witness Poems: On Premature Death Among the Unhoused

These poems are acts of witnessing.

They emerge from the daily work of encountering lives that are not only precarious, but administratively fragile—lives that can disappear not just from the street, but from the systems meant to recognize them. The deaths described here are often recorded as “exposure,” “natural causes,” or “unknown.” The language is clinical, neutral, sufficient for filing. It is not sufficient for understanding.

What these poems attempt is not explanation, and not consolation. They remain close to the ground: to concrete, to paper, to the small objects a person carries when they have nowhere else to put their life. They attend to the gap between official accounts and lived realities, where a human life is compressed into a line item, a checkbox, a report no one reads.

These are witness poems in a strict sense. They do not invent. They do not embellish. They stand alongside the fact of death and ask what it means to live—and to die—within systems that require proof of existence while failing to sustain it.

If there is a thread that runs through them, it is this:
no one intends these deaths, and yet they happen with a terrible regularity, produced through ordinary practices, familiar categories, and the quiet competence of institutions doing their work.

To witness is not to resolve.
It is to refuse disappearance.

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Editorial Pass on the Poems

(I’ve kept changes precise and minimal, tightening rhythm, removing redundancy, and sharpening images.)

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What We Do With the Ones Who Don’t Wake Up

We find him in the morning,
the way we always find them—
face pressed into the concrete
as if he were listening
to something the earth was saying.

We call it exposure.
The city calls it exposure.
The coroner calls it exposure.
As if the cold were a kind of
nakedness he chose.

His name was Carl.
He had a name.
He kept it folded in his shoe
with the number of his sister
in Fresno
who did not know
he had stopped answering
because the phone was gone.

We covered him.
We always cover them
with whatever is available—
a tarp, a blanket, a newspaper,
our own looking.

This is what forty-seven means
when you sleep outside:
the last year of your life.

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Exposure

To die of cold
in California
takes a particular
negotiation—

the fog’s slow toll,
the pavement’s old
indifference
rolled into your spine
all night.

The distinction holds:
at this cost
a man becomes
a thing the city tips
then lets slip
out of the morning news.

No one accuses cold.
Cold never chooses.
It is we
who set the lever.

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Kaddish for the Ones Who Died on Anapamu Street

I saw them carried off in the blue hour
before the street sweepers came,
before the lawyers drove past in their Audis
with the windows up,

I saw Marcus, Purple Heart,
recurring dream of his mother’s kitchen,
die between a planter and a parking meter
on a Tuesday in February,

I saw the cleanup crew
in orange vests and plastic gloves
as though death were a kind of litter,

I saw the intake form never filed,
the case never opened,
the next-of-kin box left blank
like a small white field of surrender,

I saw forty-three, fifty-one, fifty-eight—
ages printed in a report
no elected official read past the first page,

I saw the candles,
the names read aloud in December,
the living wrapped in the same sleeping bags
because warmth is warmth
and the night does not negotiate—

Who dies at fifty-three of pneumonia
in the richest county in America?
Who dies of a tooth
that found the blood?
Who dies with a phone number in their shoe?

Holy the concrete that held him.
Holy the name no one said.
Holy the cold called natural causes.
Holy Marcus. Holy Carl.
Holy the ones whose names
we are still learning to say.

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He Did Not Die — He Simply

He did not die — He simply
was no longer there —
the doorway held his outline
like a frame holds air —

the cold had been his landlord
some twenty years or more —
it knew his every weakness,
it knew which way he wore

his coat against the evening,
his back against the wall —
December came to claim him
the way it claims them all —

not violently — but patiently —
the way a fact is made —
he owed the city nothing —
the city was not paid —

they wrote: exposure — in the ledger —
closed the little book —
as if a life were weather —
as if we needn’t look —

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The Threshold He Kept

There is a kind of faithfulness
in the man who returns each night
to the same doorway—

not because he has given up
but because he has learned
this particular shadow
fits the shape of his sorrow.

There is something we do not understand
about the discipline
of surviving
what we have decided
should not have to be survived.

He knew the hour the fog came in.
He knew which officers passed without stopping
and which carried that tiredness
that is almost kindness.

He knew how the cold moves—
first into the hands,
then into the part of the mind
that holds the names
of who you used to be.

I do not want to make his suffering beautiful.
I want to say he was beautiful
before it,
during it,
and on the morning we found him

when the beauty had gone elsewhere
and left only the fact of him
on the pavement
like a question
the city has not learned to ask.

What does it mean
to cross a threshold
no one opens for you?

He knew. Precisely.
He kept that knowledge
the way the poor keep everything—
carefully,
with both hands,
until the hands let go.

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What the Coroner’s Report Did Not Say About Rafael

The coroner’s report did not say
that Rafael Cisneros learned English
from a foreman in a Ventura field
who docked his pay
for every five minutes he was slow.

It did not say
he sent money home for eleven years,
that his mother kept his letters
in a blue wooden box
in a village outside Oaxaca
where they do not yet know.

The report said: male, Hispanic, approximately 52.
The report said: exposure, blunt trauma, chronic alcohol use.
The report said: no known next of kin.

It did not say he had kin.
It did not say kin is a word
that only works
when someone tries.

He slept in the creek bed off Milpas
for six years—long enough
to know every officer by name,
long enough to be called part of the neighborhood
without ever being invited inside.

He died in February.
The jacarandas were not yet blooming.

By the time they bloomed
his case was closed,
his belongings in a county bag,
his name on our list
of names we read each December
so the courthouse
does not forget
what it has done.

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Inventory

Among his belongings:
one sleeping bag, green, compromised zipper,
one backpack with a change of socks,
a photograph of two children
whose names we did not learn,

a phone charger for a phone not found,
one library book, overdue,
The Old Man and the Sea—

which I mention only because
it feels like the kind of detail
someone would call too on the nose
in a workshop.

But this is not a story.

This is a list.

This is what fifty-three years
compress to
when the compression
is done by a system
not designed
to hold the whole thing.

There was also a folder—
birth certificate, social security card,
a VA letter dated 2019
regarding a claim still under review
at the time of his death.

I keep thinking about the folder.
The way he kept it dry.

The way he carried his proof of existence
everywhere he went,

as if he knew
that sooner or later
someone would ask him
to prove it.