You were on the cusp of life, still dripping fresh from the womb of adulthood.
Your Bachelor of Arts diploma sat on your dresser next to your manuscript. It collected dust as you shed skin and sweat. Your collegiate self, sloughed off somewhere in between Washington and Lafayette. She gave you men and indecency, and you wandered into bars on backstreets, doused in cigarette smoke and pseudo artists trying to impress you on art that’s lost in the cracks of a dead city. You lost your virginity in a cold black way, with sloppy hands and mouths that tasted like gin coming back up. Regret was too late, betrayed in the imprints in the sheets your bodies left behind, linen marked by your blood there like ink blots. You wondered who this person was and why inky darkness lapped at your ankles like a polluted sea.
You ate indiscretion with your words. You cut your hair and dyed it the color of tar. Your eyes were ashy around the peripheries. Sometimes you didn’t bother to removes your makeup or brush your hair. You loved looking bed-ragged and tousled. You took up smoking again and bruised your skin, inside out stars on a flesh canvas. You met men from sharing cigarettes with the collar of your leather coat turned up. Your hair concealed your face but left your neck bare and pale. You smoked cigarettes and exhaled into abandonment. Somewhere you heard popping of rounds and remember someone told you that kids just like shooting their older siblings handguns at empty bottles.
The taste of you could be found on the thinnest pieces of flesh on your body. Places where the indigo veins ran in sinuosity. You wondered when it was that blood turned red because there was no oxygen here. Only smoke.
You pierced your nose, wore filmy black clothing that covered every inch of skin except your fingers, pale extremities gilded with silver. You discovered red lipstick in shades like Shanghai Express, Eros and What Once Was Yours. You downed Hendricks on the rocks moving your hips to drunken and drug induced rhythms. You watched the sun come up over a putrid green grey skyline, two bodies on either side of you, your conscious pounding in your temples. He gives you back your underwear that you left the night before in the basement at work. You all change in front of each other, into white button ups while the bodies of swine and goat and lamb hang from their feet in the walk in refrigerator. Next to the beer and the extra stock, they hang skinned, swaying above a puddle of their own blood.
*
There are more days that you are angry at nothing. You drive to work in your foreign car and take inventory of the random forgotten pieces left on the side of the road: a throw carpet, lazy-boy, a few couches, the cushions a little less than a mile ahead, decapitated baby dolls, diapers, shreds of tires, abandon cars with the windows smashed out, solid McDonalds bags. A dog tried to run a crossed the four lanes one day and somehow made it to the second. You could feel the terror there like and adrenaline needle before the front end of a Cavalier hurled its body into the air. You pulled over and threw up on the gravel. My father calls it America’s Wasteland. You are angry at a city that does nothing for itself. You are angry at its disillusion.
*
It was late. He was drunk and you were exhausted, and no matter how much you thrust in slow waves or pivoted your hips, you couldn’t satisfy him. Your knuckles ached from gripping the gritty hotel sheets near his shoulders. He smelled and tasted of stale beer and burned paper. The more you filled your mouth with him the harder you tried not to gag against the hardening muscle. Casino chips lay on the bureau next to a Holy Bible and a bowl, blackened glass like the irises of his eyes.
The darkness hid the bleeding circles of black spreading beneath the rims of your eyes and the dampness there took you by surprise. You became numb to emotion, turning it on and off like a switchboard. You cried and he never knew. Instead he turned away from you, his groans slurring into groggy snores. Sleep didn’t find you until his clammy fingers found your waistline before the sun found your eyes. And his touch was impatient and alarming. But the fight, the word “no” fled you.
His breath was charred, eyes burning as he crawled on top of you, wrapping his legs around yours so you couldn’t move. And you choked on your response and you wished he would just get it over with. Instead, he pulled you into the bathroom, white and stark, frigid, blinding. Your clit sore and abused from fucking him, you winced, failing again. He pounded the counter with his fist. So you took him full again into your mouth, outside of yourself, closed your eyes and you were back home to a scalding shower and warm cotton sheets. All the stale smells and briny putrid tastes either from your tears or from him coming quickly and hastily, selfishly on you until you couldn’t swallow anymore. That part of him ran down your chin. You found the edge of the toilette and vomited. He threw a towel at you, stained with beer that had been spilt on the counter, and told you to clean up.
There were men and boys. You pretended you wouldn’t have to see them at work. You mistook love for the backseats of cars and drunken gazes and sloppy hands. You made mistakes, took medication in little blue pills and cried silently in the shower before work. You blamed her. Life paused and so did you.
*
You sliced a chunk out of the tip of my thumb. It was Monday. You had no tables. You sliced bread until the serrated edge like razors found your skin and mistook it for the raw crust of multigrain. Your blood came in increasing drips of red, dotting the white cutting board, crumbs pooling with the liquid. You saw the flap of skin, the seeping of blood.
Then pain coming instantly, a heartbeat in your fingertip.
Part of you wonders if you let the knife slip, to give yourself a wound, a remembrance of this place and time, a scar to catch a glimpse of when you’re writing or driving or perhaps in the wake of a morning that has left you aching and worn. You look at that scar, put it to your teeth and pause there to bite the discolored, waxy skin.
*
Your hands are cracked around the edges, on the pads of your fingers, in white lines, like dusty strands of hair left in a corner. Pink fingers with scathed patches of skin. You hate how they feel, thirsty for sweat or oil. Something to penetrate those dried up lines like tiny parched tributaries, skin that feels as if your outgrowing it, stretching over the frame of your body, you can nearly hear it creek when you clench your fists, wrap your fingers around large plates, rubbing and burnishing silverware until its luster is unhindered of fingerprints and watermarks. It tightens until you can nearly feel it rip in the thinnest places, where your knuckles join and bend, you expected to see exposed bone. Water from kitchen faucets is deceptive. You flash your hands quickly there to rinse excess butter or foodstuff or ketchup and the temporary dampness reminds you of a burst of cool air on a humid, sticky afternoon.
But the relief vanishes.
Moments later, your hands even more chapped than before. The heat from the large porcelain plates, the heat lamps at the runner station sips and suckles ever last drop of moisture from your palm to fingertips. Yet passing by a window or glass door you see your face, sheen with a mist of its own oil and sweat. You’ve never felt so ugly in a place you call home.
*
You wake up to little headaches between your eyes, so intense in one small pinpoint that it feels like someone is driving a needle, slowly, with purpose through your skull. You feel older than you should, like old porcelain forgotten in an attic somewhere.
Your life has been whittled down to bone, down to ritual of tying the Chef Ware Apron, checking the side work list chart, memorizing your sections and grabbing a yellow polishing rag.
*
You read this poem in the Detroit newspapers. What is this city? What is this smog and smoke, this place like a room in a house that a dead girl once lived in. No one wants to confront what is there. She is dead and will never be resurrected. And if she were she would come back as something fake and synthetic, cast in its own dismembered parts t be stuffed into a casing like sausage.
*
You made me, what with steel garters and soiled underpinnings. You uprooted me.
She walks bare foot in the street, broken glass from crack vials glitter near the bus station under the mustard yellow street lamps, buzzing in her ear.
You are a hard woman, cast from the ore of the earth and a vixen you have made me.
You are a Jezebel stalking prey in on street corners, outside of liquor shops that stand a crossed from a deserted church. Those younger men are naïve and feel a little sorry for you but love the length of your legs and the sheen of your skin. Your fingers are blistered and callused over permanently from the flick of a lighter, heat of the pipe, and you reach out to touch his face but he pulls back, every time he pulls away when he sees what you are up close.
You used to be beautiful. Your veins have run dry.
*
You’ve stopped waiting up, wiping the makeup off your face, smearing black and red of blood and metal and sweat and carnage across your forehead and the bridge of your nose, blotting away the repentance left in burgeoning colors on a white cloth. You scrub until your skin is raw and void of this and you forget where you are when you look in the mirror. The fury burns in pink splotches on the peripheries of your face and neck.
*
The Collins glass was half empty, ice cubes dissipating from the mesh of body heat and a heavy summer night…the seasons became extremes, no in betweens, it always seemed to be an endless fervent summer, things melting off and dripping onto each other, unrecognizable, and winter stretched on gray and murky like the puddles of slush in the streets. The snow never seemed to be white, the wind cutting through the buildings like a cleaver, butchering the beams that barely hold up the decayed infrastructures that are supposed to protect you.
You wash down your shifts with gin and soda water, the effervescence clearing your conscious. The man in the seat next to you wheeled his bicycle in minutes after you sat down. His face is pocked in scars, one eye permanently sealed shut. He asks you for money and tries to explain himself, “You know, I’d understand if you said no…” He fingers one of the scars on his face, “cuz you know, helping the homeless is kinda taboo.” He doesn’t look at you but above you somewhere. And before you can answer the bartender yells for him to get the fuck out.
You wonder why this upsets you. But the bartender tells you this isn’t New York or D.C. People here who beg with $500 bicycles or Air Jordans have no business begging for money. He either stole the bike and the shoes or he has the money to afford them. Either way, he doesn’t deserve a handout. You turn to watch the man peddle off into the snow, teetering on the roads that are never cleared or salted. The sky, a purple gold pulsation, the signs of Motor City Casino. The cold draft breathes irony.
*
It’s past midnight and you’ve finished the last of the polishing. Your body aches and crunches and creaks as you throw on street clothes. When you pass through the kitchen you stop by Nick’s station where he scrubs down the grates of the grill, soot streaking the contours of his bare arms. You approach him and rub your nose on his shoulder. He reaches into his Chef Ware pants, and places the folding blade into your hand. You keep your hands tucked into the pockets of your leather jacket, where you keep your hand on the ridges of the handle as you pass down the backstreet that leads to the parking lot, fingering the ridges and smooth metal with callused fingertips. No one will try to rob you tonight, but a few men will sniff at you as you pass each other. Never turn around. Keep your focus ahead. They leave you in a frothing wake of gurgling, muttering obscenities, a foulness like cheap whiskey and Coney dogs coming back up, spewed on the side of a building. The blade rests there in your pocket and you stop, retrieve it and pull the blade forward with a click. And as you press the tip into the pad of your thumb, you wonder, if it came to it, would you be able to drive it through a man and into their vitality.
*
There are lost souls here that haunt the street. The walking dead. Sometimes I don’t believe there is a person there, that it’s just their shell wandering around displaced, wondering what happened to their lives, how the chunks of rock, the flame, the smoke, the rusty spoon left on the folding table that they used to call theirs. How did it get to this? The white plumes seeping out of eye sockets. I learned to have my keys in palm even before I hit the valet station. It was a pleasant day, buses going round in circles, the valet guys calling out to me to be good on my day off. I pay the attendant and there is a man standing in front of my car, pissing into a plastic bottle, his shriveled penis hanging there like some sickly serpent. I don’t move and he stares into me, and then I think no not into me, through me. This is what emptiness is. He wears a Detroit Tigers cap, frayed at the bill, stained flannel shirt, months, maybe years of bearded whiskers littered with bits of dirt or left over garbage from somewhere. He stands in front of my car filling the bottle full of dark yellow urine, then turns, dick still out, and launches the bottle into the dumpster two cars behind mine.
*
This is what emptiness looks like: stolen sneakers through a smashed car window
They tell you not to leave anything visible in your car. Bums go for lose change and sneakers. Anything they can grab to use or sell. And every time I walk to the parking lot with a different co-worker, when we approach, the fractures in the windowsill aren’t visible until you come right up to it. The streetlight ricocheted off the splinters of shards, gleaming, a wasted city’s jewelry.
They didn’t even take anything this time.
*
They preach greening, rebuilding, sustainability.
Build a greener city. Cover the buildings in romanticized tendrils of vines
Plant a tree save a junkie. Do they know their trees are fed from the decay of the street, roots draining up the nutrients from bodies forgotten in back alleys, bodies at the mercy of the barrel of a gun? How green will your trees be then?
*
We are doing something we are breathing life back into this city. Girls and boys at happy hour sit and preach how the arts can save lives, did you hear about this new band, her art is epic, we will change the world. Them in their Buddy Holly frames and flannel and beanies with their pompadours and red lipstick and army boots competing with themselves, competing to see who can better deny the status quo, the when they’ve already become the status quo.
*
There are new luxury lofts going in near Fox Theater. The have a beautiful view and two floors with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and picture windows. I passed a man frozen to death on the bench a crossed the street from the hotel. The paradigm of renovation, its marbled floors and expensive lighting and celebrity chef restaurants. They film movies in the ballroom. And I share the elevator with two women, one crying silently into a bath towel with the hotel’s insignia stitched in. She was evicted that morning. She takes care of her daughter and her daughter’s child while the father tries to break his crack habit in their basement. An elevator ride 20 floors up tells the whole life of a person.
*
*
We rifle through 10 dishwashers a week like a deck of cards. Some no show, others steal leftover food put into the dish tank from the tables of people who can afford a meal every night. He was the only one who stayed consistently, worked in silence, called the men “sir” and me “miss” but never looked anyone in the face, like an abused animal who trusted no one but wanted so badly to. When he didn’t show up for the first time in his three months of working double shifts, they went searching for him. His bungalow caught fire in the middle of the night while he was out picking up groceries for his daughter. The only thing he has now are the Chef Ware pants and pack of t-shirts we gave him.
A sliver of an echo in a life you once knew.
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