The Beauty and Audacity of Black Detroit

The sky broke that summer
salt-swept the city, collapsed
the freeways' movement.
Some say they were cursed

anyway, those man-made roads
that crashed straight through
the parts of town
built by Black migrants.

This is not a poem about the freeways,
or the way the city emptied
when we arrived,
but if those roads filled like a pitcher,

we should have known
what would become
of the basements,
even Burton, monument

that it is. Was.
Photocopied maps.
Obituaries.
Property deeds.

Records of whole families
floating in a pool
of their own waste.

Black Out, August 2003, Detroit

It was one of the biggest power outages that the US ever saw. At first, people were worried it was an act of terrorism, but when the blackout was confirmed as merely a power outage, the mood shifted. —Michigan Radio Newsroom

The grills turn up. Somebody speakers
serenade all our porches, and we jam,
smoke-soaked and lawless, all open
hormones and this powerless field.
What is it about the end of the world,
makes you think you are owed
an explanation? From God. From
your mama. From the boy who ghosted
months ago, when the air became
more steam than breeze, his number
still memorized and half-dialed each evening.
You would chase him down, make him answer
to you while the streetlights are silent,
but this block, this city, don’t know
how to tell us apart in the daylight—
done swallowed whole bodies before
this night, ripe for disappearing.
First, the “man” of the house next door
swept clean off his mama’s porch.
Maria, a dandelion blown away
from the passenger seat of her new man's
custom Cutlass. My city give a fuck
about the proper order of things. She love
a malfunction. All them downed
wires. Mirrors broken in the street.
Our minivan, sat on stolen bricks
by thieves kind enough to leave the metal
skeleton stripped in the driveway. This block
hormone swoll, smelling herself. There is
no law. Sometimes, in May, it snows.