- Hard Times in the Motor City
When Louie got married somebody gave him a broken bicycle for a present in all sad seriousness.
Louie gave it back— him and his new wife traveling light— a toaster and clock radio heading south west east wherever jobs might be.
Up and down the streets men mow their lawns do yardwork many try to grow vegetables.
Some of the wives work now behind counters at McDonald’s marking clothes at K-Mart pulling in minimum wage grocery money for another week
Everybody’s already had a garage sale.
In the bar Steve talks about the afternoon tv movie about Elvis about fighting anyone. He says he’ll dig ditches
or clean shitholes All he wants is a job. He’s got a wife, two kids.
He looks me hard in the eye: “A man can always afford a drink”
Dennis, laid-off trucker borrowed some money took his rig to Florida loaded up a truck full of pot sells it out of his basement to help make house payments.
Dennis sits on his porch smoking up the profits singing old rock and roll songs his electric guitar plugged into the bushes.
An old man talks about the Great Depression: “You don’t see nobody jumpin’ out of windows around here.”
But in the backyards of Detroit Warren, Hazel Park, Center Line men on their knees pray over their rotten tomatoes their deformed carrots their ragged, ragged lettuce.
Jim Daniels grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit and worked summers in a Ford axle plant to earn money for college. His first book of poems, Places/Everyone, won the 1985 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.