And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

Thirty Years Rising

Thirty Years Rising I needed to point to the buildings, as if they all stood for something, as if Detroit could rise again into its own skyline, filled in as it always is inside me: each cracked sidewalk, each of the uniformed girls, braided and quiet as weeds, each bicycled boy, each man with a car and a wife, the ones I slept with and arranged, neatly, like a newly laid subdivision. But I was driving with my brother who doesn't like to think of the thirty years rising inside us, the leavened truth. He's arrived at the heavy black X of destination on the inside of his forehead and he doesn't want to see me looking like this: open-palmed and childishly dressed, with hipbones instead of children, aching to put my sneakered feet on his new leather dash. He doesn't want to hear me say something fucked-up, something like: It's in my bones. My sternum runs like Woodward Avenue, it's pinnated, parked on, full of dirt, holding women in wigs and cigarettes, bars lit from the outside in, it's overflowing with pooltables and ashtrays. My ribs are holding up factories and breweries, two-bedroom houses and multi-storied lives, this strip, this city, these sidestreets, a bony feather. 35 He's lived here all his life. But I gave up these streets for so many others. I hopped turnstiles to ride the Metro, memorized EL tracks and Muni stations until I had a huge worn subway map on the inside of my head, but couldn't get off at any stop, couldn't begin to live in any city, and couldn't sleep with anybody but myself. I gave up this body for so many others. I've been both an exaggeration of myself and someone who looks just like me but sounds different. But now I'm back to visit both, and I need to point to my first hotel room; to the mortuary above which my tall half-chinese half-german punkrockboyfriend fingered me like a book in his little bed; and to the hospital where our bonemother died so late or so early that we were both sound asleep. I didn't say it, but: My sternum is breaking with this, it's sinking like Woodward as Detroit rises around my brother's turn, rises and falls. Falls not at all like this light summer rain but hard, like someone else's memory, insistent, unwanted, but suddenly, and again, being claimed. ...