Made in Detroit: Poems Read online

  in the mirror. The poor have been

  discarded already into the oblivion

  pail of not to be spoken words.

  They are as lepers were treated once,

  to be shipped off to fortified islands

  of the mind to rot quietly. If

  poverty is a disease, quarantine

  its victims. If it’s a social problem

  imprison them behind high walls.

  Maybe it’s genetic: how often they

  catch easily preventable diseases.

  Feed them fast garbage and they’ll

  die before their care can cost you,

  of heart attacks, stroke. Provide

  cheap guns and they’ll kill each

  other well out of your sight.

  Ghettos are such dangerous places.

  Give them schools that teach

  them how stupid they are. But

  always pretend they don’t exist

  because they don’t buy enough,

  spend enough, give you bribes

  or contributions. No ads target

  their feeble credit. They are not

  real people like corporations.

  Don’t send dead flowers

  There is your mother, your son, your friend

  with their insides sucked out, organs

  in the sewage, that primped body

  filled with carcinogenic chemicals

  painted, pinned, presented for your

  enjoyment like plastic fruit in a bowl.

  Everybody is supposed to coo,

  simper, doesn’t she look as if

  she’s sleeping. But she’s stone dead

  and half of her gone missing now.

  An organ oozes lugubrious sound.

  Dead flowers surround the corpse.

  I want to go into the earth quickly,

  quietly and give my minerals back.

  I want to become the living soil,

  home of beetles and yes, worms.

  Let my flesh feed and my bones

  fertilize. Gone not to dust but dirt,

  the mother of us all. Coffins

  like limousines, like Mercedes

  expensive and shiny for the left-

  overs of a person, pretending

  death is a nap and people are

  permanent marble monuments.

  My flesh tears easily, bruises,

  will rot and stink and finally end

  sweet as compost, giving itself

  to trees, to grass, to wildflowers

  and bees and mice, to whatever

  wants to grow from my spent life.

  A hundred years since the Triangle Fire

  On March 25, 1911, a fire spread through the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The mostly immigrant workers, young Italian, Jewish, and German women who sewed shirtwaists, or women’s blouses, were trapped behind locked doors. The death toll was 146, and many women, their clothing and hair burning, threw themselves from the windows to their deaths on the pavement far below, while spectators watched and could not help. Shortly thereafter, twenty thousand women struck for improved working conditions and wages. The factory building is now part of New York University. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire remains the fourth largest industrial disaster in U.S. history.

  Bodies falling through the air

  when all exits from the fire are closed

  to them and flames lick their skin:

  we have seen that.

  In our time and theirs.

  Labor was cheap then;

  too often cheap now, sweat

  shops, whether crammed into

  Brooklyn lofts or shipped

  overseas. Women are cheap and

  children are cheaper. Doors

  locked against their escape.

  Growing up in center city

  Detroit when the factories

  hummed like huge hives

  at night and the sky was pink

  from steel mills on the river

  I learned early how replaceable

  we all were to those with

  power to replace us.

  I see your charred clothes

  glued to flesh as you hurtle

  toward pavement, my sisters,

  hard worked women with

  blistered hands, forced to labor

  six days, whose rest came

  only in histories that can never

  rectify what greed ignited.

  Ethics for Republicans

  An embryo is precious;

  a woman is a vessel.

  A fertilized egg is a person;

  a woman is indentured to it.

  An embryo is sacred until birth.

  After that, he/she is on their own.

  Abortion is murder. Rape,

  incest are means to an end:

  that precious fertilized egg

  housed in an expendable body.

  Let us make babies and babies

  and babies; children are something

  else, probably future criminals,

  probably welfare cheats whose

  education hikes taxes. You

  can freely dispose of them.

  Another obituary

  We were filled with the strong wine

  of mutual struggle, one joined loud

  and sonorous voice. We carried

  each other along revolting, chanting,

  cursing, crafting, making all new.

  First Muriel, then Audre and Flo,

  now Adrienne. I feel like a lone

  pine remnant of virgin forest

  when my peers have met the ax

  and I weep ashes.

  Yes, young voices are stirring now,

  the wind is rising, the sea boils

  again, yet I feel age sucking

  the marrow from my bones,

  the loneliness of memory.

  Their voices murmur in my inner

  ear but never will I hear them

  speak new words and no matter

  how I cherish what they gave us

  I want more, I still want more.

  What it means

  Unemployed: soon invisible,

  after a while, unemployable,

  unwanted, with your future

  eroding along with confidence,

  sense of self, the family

  cracking along old fault lines.

  And what do you do? Age.

  Out of work: out of security,

  out of value, out of the routine

  that organizes the days, out

  of health insurance, out of

  the house when the mortgage

  can’t be paid, out on the street,

  out of society, out of luck.

  Your job was shipped

  overseas. Your job and two

  others are being done now

  by one frantic worker.

  A robot replaced you.

  Your company was bought

  and demolished.

  Somebody elected you

  superfluous, a discard.

  Somebody made money;

  somebody bought a yacht

  with your old salary. Some-

  body has written you off,

  Somebody is killing you.

  At night when you can no

  longer sleep, don’t blame your-

  self. What could you have

  done? Nothing. Choices were

  made to fatten dividends,

  bloat bonuses, pay for a new

  trophy wife and private plane.

  You did nothing wrong

  except your birth. Wrong

  parents. Wrong place. Wrong

  race. Wrong sex. If only

  you’d had the sense to be

  born to the one percent

  life would be truffles today.

  How have the mighty …

  What we have done to you
/>
  for our convenience. In cave

  paintings you stand, huge, looming

  over hunters with your sharp

  deadly horns and prancing hooves.

  You could reach seven feet tall

  at your massive shoulders.

  Called Aurochs, now just cows.

  We have tamed the wildness out,

  shrunk you to an amenable size.

  You were bigger than bison,

  fierce, worshipped for your strength

  companions of the moon goddess.

  In the Greek islands, dove cotes

  sacred to her are marked with

  your horns. Hathor the cow

  goddess gave fertility and joy.

  I meet your limpid gaze as you

  chew your cud under a scrub oak

  then rise lowing to be milked:

  turned from monarch to food.

  We know

  The crickets are loud at night

  a chorus of teakettles demanding

  sex. The tomato plants begin

  to brown from the bottom up.

  South of here a hurricane comes

  ashore with murder in its hollow

  heart, winds little can stand

  against, a surge of tide roiling

  over seawalls. The lords of oil

  know they will survive however

  the soil cracks with drought

  and cattle and mustangs die

  of thirst. No matter how tornadoes

  level towns, strewing the precious

  of lives across rubble. Hurricanes

  move in posses across the weather

  map. We who garden feel climate

  change in our dirty hands, see

  strange new bugs and stampeding

  weeds, piles of eggplants and no

  peas, fewer butterflies, more horse-

  flies. We face the ocean that is way

  too warm this time of year and wait

  and worry, but we do not pray

  to the lords of oil who control

  the climate but to whatever god

  we offer our hope like the fruits

  Cain brought that were rejected.

  The passion of a fan

  What part of a person is tied up

  in the sports team they watch

  on TV? I remember the day after

  the Patriots lost the Super Bowl

  to the Giants, the streets of Wellfleet

  were dim with the fog of depression.

  Defeat wafted through houses, offices,

  stores. It was yellow-grey and tasted

  of salt and pollution. In Byzantium

  supporters of green or blue chariot

  racing teams killed each other

  till the streets ran crimson.

  We not only root for our teams

  but see wars as giant hockey

  games. Our team’s basketball

  forward is dearer than a neighbor

  or cousin or co-worker. He

  is our darling, our avatar.

  Somehow we seek to become him.

  We wear his number. We

  imagine he would love us

  back. But we don’t exist.

  We’re just noise in the stadium,

  so many numbered ticket holders,

  sad faces, autograph seekers

  a maw into which that player’s

  talent is leeched until glory

  days are over and he retires

  to fail at a restaurant and die

  at fifty-eight of an enlarged heart.

  In pieces

  Governments, TV newsmen count soldiers

  dead, wounded—mostly the dead, never

  the brain dead or the damaged in what

  passes for life, the suicides, the trained

  killers who can’t stop loading their anger.

  But mostly that’s not who dies from

  a drone attacking a suspicious crowd

  that is really a market. Just caught

  in crossfire. The wrong place [their

  little house] wrong time [family meal].

  A school is poisoned, a wedding

  party is strafed, a hospital is blown

  up. Babies are collateral damage.

  A pregnant woman may be hiding

  a bomb in her maternity clothes.

  The dogs, the cats, the birds tame

  and wild, the cattle, goats, lizards,

  hares, foxes, all the creatures who

  live in what has become a battlefield

  and have no way to safety: they die.

  Trees perish; whole forests, whole

  ecosystems are bombed out of

  existence. Creeks poisoned. Soil

  honeycombed with mines. Farms

  vanished. Ways of living destroyed.

  After armies have gone back home

  where taxes still pay for that war,

  how many decades will pass until

  the land is green and fertile again,

  people do not scream in their sleep

  if they dare to sleep, children play

  in fields without losing a leg or head,

  birds sing celebrating their nests,

  neighbors forgive desperate choices

  and a thing ripped is finally knit whole.

  Ghosts

  How often we navigate by what is no

  longer there. Turn right where the post

  office used to be. She lives in a condo

  above where the bakery blew sweet

  yeasty smells into the street. A nail

  salon now.

  Kelsey Hayes had a factory there

  on Livernois where our neighbors

  worked. A foundry spat out metal

  where the strip club spits neon

  now and loud skanky music

  into the night.

  Rows of little cheap houses replaced

  by a few McMansions. Where did

  all those people go? The workers

  in factories, in tool and die shops,

  the shoemakers and tailors, mom

  and pop eateries?

  You can be plunked down in Anywhere

  U.S.A. and see the same row of stores

  Target, Walmart, Gap, Toys-R-Us.

  Exit the superhighway: McDonald’s,

  Taco Bell, Burger King, Hardees,

  you haven’t moved.

  That’s where the school was: see,

  it’s condos now. That’s the church

  the parish closed to pay for priests’

  sex. China got the shoe factory.

  Urban renewal turned the old neighbor-

  hood to dust.

  Some things we make better and some

  are destroyed by greed and bad

  politics. We live in the wake

  of decisions we didn’t share in,

  survivors of a vast lethal typhoon

  of power.

  One of the expendables

  Cape Cod is wed to the mainland

  by two bridges, on mild week

  ends and all summer fed

  by miles of backed up cars.

  Right across Massachusetts

  Bay, one of the worst nuclear

  power plants, clone of Fukushima

  leaks into the bay. On its roof

  three thousand spent rods.

  Vulnerable to hurricane, flooding,

  attack from the air or land,

  it squats menacing us.

  We who live here all year, our

  hundred thousands of summer

  visitors, we have been deemed

  expendable since we cannot

  by any means be evacuated.

  “Shelter in place” means breathe

  in, absorb through your skin,

  drink, swallow, eat radiation.

  Your home will be uninhabitable

  should you happen to survive

  at least a while b
efore cancer

  dissolves your organs. The land

  the pure water we cherish

  will be tainted for decades. Fish,

  birds, your dog and cats, raccoons,

  squirrels, coywolves expendable

  too. We count for nothing

  compared to profits for a utility

  housed in New Orleans where

  you’d imagine they know floods.

  We’re the throwaway people,

  not important like corporations.

  Chop off the crooked arm

  of Cape Cod and let us bleed.

  Let’s meet in a restaurant

  Is food the enemy?

  Giving a dinner party has become

  an ordeal. I lie awake the night

  before figuring how to produce

  a feast that is vegan, gluten free,

  macrobiotic, avoiding all acidic

  fruit and tomatoes, wine, all nuts,

  low carb and still edible.

  Are beetles okay for vegans?

  Probably not. Forget chocolate

  ants or fried grasshoppers.

  Now my brains are cooked.

  Finally seven o’clock arrives

  and I produce the perfect meal.

  At each plate for supper, a bowl

  of cleanly washed pebbles. Enjoy!