You Move to Detroit

by Erik Donald France

 

With your old black Lab, a box of books, a dilapidated Datsun.
Your sister's murdered by some nutcase in another state, far away.
Your mother dies of cancer, slow enough to speed up your drinking
and on top of the family pain, your girlfriend won't move here because
she's not your girlfriend anymore, doesn't like Detroit.

Your Datsun dies right after your mother. You haul it to a chop shop,
buy a beater that dies like the first. You try a new car, no money down,
befriend a bipolar who sells you his excess drugs. You're soon arrested:
drunk driving; weeks later you go out with coworkers, get plastered,
speed down Mack Avenue; find your way blocked by cops with
drawn pistols. You call them fascists, spit in their faces,
get thrown in jail. Fined, License taken. Apartment searched.
Community Service. Sobriety workshops. Your insurance quadruples.
Your father is hospitalized back East: looks grim. You get in a fistfight.
Thrown out of a bar. Smoke pot, mix martinis, drive to
a different bar with your dog, Dylan blaring. Soon have to file for bankruptcy,
Chapter 7. Defer student loans. Turn in your car. Take buses or walk.
Borrow heavily. Loan sharks, coworkers, anybody. Laid off.

Within weeks, you find another job in a distant city and so, everything else on the curb,
with your old black Lab who now has pink eye and a crippled leg, and with your one box
of books, and the unwashed clothes you wear and just enough extra for a packed suitcase,
with your one big thirst still unquenched, with your one big anger still unquelled, with
your one big pain still unrelenting -- you can leave Detroit.

© 2005 Erik Donald France

Erik Donald France has lived most of his life in North Carolina. He has taught writing, poetry, literature, history and Latin American Studies at various colleges and high schools and worked as an archivist and librarian in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Michigan. He currently resides in Metro Detroit, where he's working on a historical biography, poetry, fiction, and, as editor, a book on censorship.