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Panic in Detroit
- University of Arkansas Press
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Panic in Detroit The first balmy night of April, magnolia buds aimed to fire into May, I ask please let’s walk. Only around the park trail, maybe a mile. I want to lean in to your shoulder, your jacket’s soft collar, make the one tilted shadow we make. I don’t want to be lonely the way I’ve been, crying into the sink. And so I walk, a woman alone in the park at night, and sing above apprehension this song from the seventies. The lyrics don’t ever make sense but they feel good, called out from the cave of my chest, the college girl code for everything gone to hell or heaven-bound: Panic in Detroit, so don’t wait up! I wrote those words to my roommates in a notebook we left by the phone, my happy scrawl three sheets deep, the night Sam took me downtown for my first blues, a night like this thirty years ago, sweet daddy let me follow you down. The club doors stayed open; a soft city wind hummed the bass line, hauling the blue smoke, blue notes over the Detroit River. By the time we got back to Sam’s, the sun had pressed magnolia into bullets, all over his back yard. We pulled a few twigs for vases. By noon they would open fire on the house, petal shrapnel, pink lead, artillery of heaven. Gritty from blues, smoke rising out of our hair, we lay down on the slick wood floor and slept through the afternoon, the way you and I would sleep after panic of making love—a hard, 73 animal sleep brought on by crushed blossom potion dripped into drowsy eyes. One wakes from such sleep in love with the first thing she sees, be it man or beast or curls of magnolia wilting in her hands. 74 ...