By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem stages a grim street scene where ordinary work, police violence, and moral degradation collapse into one another.
Coins, parking, and an alley begin in plain urban routine, then the sound of violence shatters that everyday frame. Calling the witness a Hyena too suggests that survival in such a scene can itself become degrading, even before any action is taken. The final image of the bleeding policeman and the assailants' cold disdain leaves behind a city where brutality has become almost procedural.
'How Low Is Renaissance': a coin-counter drives into an alley where a cop is being killed, joins in as a 'Hyena too', leaves with the cop still breathing.
The title is the thesis — a renaissance that has degraded to this. The turn is the word 'miraculously': the assailants stop not from mercy but because they can't be bothered with the witness, which is the poem's cold joke about moral accident. The citizen's participation without consequence is what keeps the page from being an op-ed.