Urban Miscellanea
2020-2022, 2025
Urban Miscellanea is an experimental multimedia anthology that celebrates creativity situated within the urban.
2020/21: States of Apprehension
2021/22: Urban emergency / urban rhythms
2025: Archiving
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Madeline Routon2020/21
Heat Island
Prose poem and playlist
Bio
Madeline (Maddy) Routon is a writer, geographer, and artist currently based at the university of Oxford. Her research focuses on DIY art in ‘autonomous’, squatted, or otherwise ‘radical’ spaces, as well as the role of the archive in preserving, presenting, and interpreting the stories of such projects.
She earned her BA in Geography and Environmental Studies from UCLA in 2015 and subsequently worked across the arts sector in Los Angeles. In her own arts practice, she writes fiction and nonfiction, takes disposable photographs, and (in a past, pre-covid life) made and taught ceramics.
Heat Island is a four-part prose poem responding to the multiple, overlapping emergencies I experienced living in Los Angeles in the summer of 2020: a record heat wave, a particularly bad surge of the wildfires that come each year, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic.
While organised by the natural elements, it weaves together the past, present, and imagination of the future inspired by and invoked by the city. The piece is semi-autobiographical, but the city and the reader remain the main characters. It is also, largely, about the ever-present anxiety and guardedness that often accompanies contemporary urban life.
As an accompaniment, here also is the playlist I made (and often walked to) during that long, hot summer: ‘heatwave’.
Full text:
‘Heat Island’
By Madeline Routon
Say you had tried to write about the city while you were in it, but couldn’t find the words. Say something of it always remained excessive, just beyond reach. Say you were still trying to get a grip on it now, miles across the Atlantic. Say the harder you tried, the further it slipped. Say you were wondering if a space could ever be represented; if your representations were worthy of taking up space. Say the memory itself became transparent, impressionistic, a thin sense of time hurtling by. Say something of it still clung to your skin, like humidity on the summer’s breath, a naked sweat you couldn’t shake. Say you called all writing ‘ephemeral’, yet wrote to achieve permanence. Say you believed you needed to mourn the city to move on from it, to stop its sirens wailing through your dreams. Say you wanted to lay its barest bones on the pyre, to capture some core element of the experience. Say you were here, trying again. Hypothetically.
- Earth
No one walks in Los Angeles. Its streets are fractured intersecting slopes, starting and stopping, overlapping. Wide boulevards, unpassable, palms lined up on either side like sentinels. You often fantasized about reading its roadmaps like the lines of a palm, tracing certainties contained within tidy categories: life, fate, heart, head. You wanted to walk, but kept getting tripped up. Gnarled roots burst from the sidewalk’s distended concrete belly, twisting like a misplaced ankle. Dandelions bloom between the cracks. You wonder who first delineated between a weed and every other kind of flower.
You grew up in the undergrowth, the chaparral-littered hillsides flanking the city’s sprawl. The ones that turn to tinder in the summers. At night, you wandered their empty avenues, suburban funhouses lined with mirror-image tract homes. There was a hole cut in the fence where the cul-de-sac dead-ended, a climb to a peak the glow from streetlamps couldn’t reach. All you could see for miles was the city’s glimmer on the horizon, the night sky punctuated by the dying embers of faraway flames. Someone once taught you how to tell them apart: unlike stars, planets don't twinkle.
As soon as you had a car, you were sucked into the city’s gravitational pull. You drove out on weekends, digging in vinyl crates and buying plastic cameras that let light leak in. Eventually, you’re drawn to the small café near the Walk of Fame, with the ungrounded microphone you shakily perform poems into each Thursday. You spot the ‘for rent’ sign near the freeway on-ramp, days after you’re accepted into UCLA. You decide the distance makes no difference, that the cockroaches will make good neighbors.
Your car dies a heat death the moment you move in, racking up parking tickets and radiator bills. You can’t afford to fix it, so you start walking again, to and from the bus that idly chugs along Sunset Boulevard toward the encroaching sea. Slowly, a new topography reveals itself to you: rhythms of the city etched in private moments glimpsed only through traffic-logged windowpanes; paths traced by characters with checkered pasts. A blind man sitting next to WeHo Jesus pulls $2 bills out of the breast pocket of his leather jacket and offers one to you as you board. Before you can take it, he tells you, ‘call me daddy’.
You stagger work shifts between classes, always catching the last bus home. Some nights you hear footsteps behind you, thinly-veiled efforts to match your pace. The distance is always too far, the hood pulled too low; you can never see their faces. Traversing the city at night becomes a sinister dance, passed between roving partners. You become intimately acquainted with the sensation of being watched, the hair rising on the back of your neck. Adrenaline speaks to you in single syllables: Lone. Girl. Run.
The maps of your life begin to take shape around this fear: you befriend the attendant who works nights at a nearby gas station, basking in the glare of its bright, accusatory floodlights. You sprint down the alley to your back door, clenching keys between your fingers. You scrape your knees on the asphalt, tripping over your own feet while throwing glances over your shoulder. When you leave, you try not to look back.
- Water
Years later, you move into a ‘safe’ neighborhood, a house with a yard and a parking space. You hate your job, but you can’t pay the rent without it. At the housewarming party, Rachel tells you when ‘the big one’ hits, the resulting tsunami probably won’t make it this far inland. ‘Maybe some mild flooding’, she says, ‘but nothing serious’. Still, you add an inflatable vest to your earthquake kit, alongside prepackaged bags of water, cash, spare clothes, dry food. A crank radio; a wrench for turning off the gas.
Anxiety has attuned you to a certain kind of atmosphere, a storm always brewing on the horizon. At times, its ambience becomes palpable, and you feel it circle you like a cyclone, choking oxygen from your lungs and replacing it with swirling thoughts that twist tighter and tighter, contorting your body into a pantomime of compulsions you can never quite control. Your muscles are permanently tensed. Ready.
But ‘the big one’ never comes. Or if it does, it is composed of a billion tiny little ones, viral particles that loll and linger on the breeze, turning even the air against you. You once stared out across yellow lawns and longed for rain. Now, you shudder at the thought of droplets.
In those first few months, everything dries up: work, money, patience, focus. Even your period stops flowing. ‘A stress response’, the nurse on screen reassures you. At first, isolation feels strange, scary, but manageable. You read the books that had long been taunting you from their sagging shelves. You feel the physical privilege of a home, force yourself to call this time ‘a blessing’, fill it with ‘productive’ tasks. You spend hours on the phone with Unemployment, the Tenant’s Union, your parents. You tune out when they mention China. You mute your notifications, watch and avoid the news in sporadic spurts. Everything goes numb, a trance punctuated by panic. Soon, you grow grateful for the moments you feel nothing.
- Air
Your therapist tells you to take deep breaths when you feel overwhelmed, but deep breaths don’t feel safe anymore. You read somewhere that animals hide when they think they're going to die, so you always cough into your elbow. Everyone keeps saying ‘it's only allergies’.
When the summer comes, you and your housemate revert to animal states: naked, sweating, parched. You wrap yourselves in damp cloths, lying against the kitchen’s cool tile to keep from passing out. You try to remember how you survived previous summers, when everything was open. You fantasize about community pools and air-conditioned cafés, oases you used to escape to during these long afternoons as the sun beat down, bounced and buoyed by vast stretches of asphalt. You force yourself to stop checking the air quality index. Each day becomes a series of strained breaths, impossible choices: open the windows and suck in smog carried by the breeze, or suffocate in a stale vacuum. ‘Cooling centers’ open in abandoned gymnasiums, advising you to enter at your own risk. You picture the poor huddled beneath feeble fans, weighing the probabilities: heat stroke, or virus? You stay home, courting a fever.
Suddenly, this city of splintered sidewalks becomes animated by bodies walking. At first, you don’t trust it. You go stir crazy inside, abusing your knees with jumping-jacks. But with time, you rekindle your romance with walking, the flaneur, the voyeur. You emerge in the evenings, when the air is still and the sun has just begun to dip behind the mountains, casting succulent shadows. Still, you hold your breath when people pass. You weave under countless window AC units panting their arid breath into the streets, and are reminded of the vast vertical architectures that make up this world, oppressing outsiders with the excesses of their insulated interiors. When you receive the surreal letter of acceptance to Oxford, you wonder if you still have any strength left for the climb.
- Fire
On your last day in Los Angeles, it is 115 degrees, the kind of heat that heralds death. Ash falls from the sky like snow and blankets everything in a shroud of black and grey. All your belongings are already in boxes, and your empty house swelters like an oven, baking you inside of it. A friend with a car comes to rescue you, driving your desiccated corpse to the coastline, where cool air rises from the ocean’s face and whispers through the lowered windows like a prayer.
Watching the waves, you realize you’d been breathing like a swimmer, swallowing shallow inhalations and spreading them across long stretches of submerged time. The smoke had come, as it did every September, and turned the particulate map red and purple like a fresh bruise. For the first time, you felt grateful for the ubiquity of masks. In previous fire seasons, you were the only one with an air purifier, plastic-wrapped packs of N95 respirators. Your sister calls one night to say, simply, ‘I’m standing on my porch, staring into a wall of flame’. In her voice, you are reminded of softness, kinship; the warmth of exhalations on exposed skin; the intimacy of being enveloped in clouds issuing from another’s mouth. You remember that ‘conspiracy’ means something like ‘closeness’: breathing together.
Months earlier, you had watched with fear and hope as the streets clogged with voices choking out cries for justice through clouds of tear gas. You thought about the community fridges sprouting up to siphon electricity from corner shops; Dani driving circles through tent cities to pass out water bottles to the unhoused; the vendedores unfurling their blankets across the park. You were reminded often of dandelions, the way they spread their roots under broken sidewalks.
Leaving began to feel like an escape and a betrayal, like abandoning a lover who had disrobed slowly, coyly, revealing themselves to you one vibrant patch of skin at a time. You realize that once you’re gone, the city will scrub itself clean of any memory of you. The traffic will keep churning, the concrete will keep being poured, the cranes will lumber through the skyline. The Los Angeles you know will never be glimpsed again. If you return, chasing the bus down those wide familiar boulevards, you’ll notice that all the bars have new names wound in neon; the community centers have been replaced with condominiums.
On the plane, rising above its tangled web of overpasses, you gather all of the city’s scattered, fragmented faces in your mind, like so many precious weeds. You visualize a match, and let it fall. You’ve remembered something about wildfires: they destroy what has died so that something new can grow.