Detroit Bittersweet

I sway

Crossing cracked streets and crushing glass beneath my feet.

I sway

In this southern city built so far to the north I can touch the border, on a coast less than a mile wide;

With barbeque, jazz, and moon pie’s on sale now for a dollar ninety five;

Where boys as black as pitch and pale as ash cut their teeth on race relations I can never hope to understand as a recent traveler to this antique zombieland.

I sway

Catcalls and comments washing over my grungy jeans and laundry day shirt.

The motion of my hips moving more men than all the water in the ocean with the selfsame notion that someday I might turn to you. Talk to you. Smile at you. Laugh with you.

This is poetry in motion, you think.

This is the place where violence begins, I know, with the shouts and the winks and the slowing your car down to call out to some strange woman that you have never met. That you will never meet in this fallen city still desperately hanging on to its Motown beat.

But the only way to change the future is one step at a time. Legs stretching out in one long line. Hips swaying as I go about my business, trying not to listen to the sounds of a city that I would so dearly love to love.