Rice U. math Ph.D. student, Boulevard Oaks resident, and poet Kenan Ince has been making the rounds of local open-mic nights with his brief ode to the as-yet-invisible but still-ominous spectre looming over 1717 Bissonnet St. known as the Ashby Highrise. The poem, entitled Rise, Ashby, begins with an epigraph clipped from a Swamplot story about the lawsuit that was filed by a few of the 21-story apartment tower’s Southampton and Boulevard Oaks neighbors last year. A video of Ince’s recent performance at Montrose’s Cafe Brasil (seen at left) has been posted on Youtube; you can read the poem — with its original, towering typography intact — below:
Rise, Ashby
You can’t miss it: Just south of Downtown, this pristine billboard went up recently above the northbound feeder of I-45. Its lonesome assertion, “Even the pigeons don’t see me,” is attributed to the “voice of the homeless.” What gives? Glasstire’s Paula Newton explains: “
“This looks like the tornadic vortex that tunneled through and created the Inversion House and could do the same to any bungalow left in Montrose. I’ve seen some of Renner’s gigantic spheres of the same colorful slats and this seems like the humongous fallopian tube that spit them out. It appears to move faster than the traffic that sits alongside it. I love that the colors reflect the rainbow flags along Westheimer left from the parade. Best of all is that HAA money went to a Houston artist! If I put my ear up to the big end, do I hear the live oaks singing? It appeals to all my senses.” [
Open Channel Flow — that 
