Saturday, July 4, 2020

D.A. Lockhart : Three poems





Pigeon Medicine Dance Through Tunnel Plaza
          after Eminem’s “Without Me”


When I arrive know that it shall come with cursing and chest pounding gestures of primate dominance. Crossing this medicine line, tucked as it is beneath the upward glass claws of the Renaissance Center, is a ritual that amounts to calling intents in small distances. Inch the car forward, towards the barrier arm and booth border. This process the very outcome our great-great-great-grandparents warned would arrive because another blowhard chief willfully traded everything for a glorified QVC pitch about freedom and unending sunshine on the land. Nine cars deep of antsy lane watching, radio scans, and checklist of half truths prepared for an officer in uniform protecting families from families.  Feel the tension soon as someone mentions me. Pale skin Indians with a mouth as free as departed ancestors the tension that would start with a slow roll up, window down, and invitation. Here's my ten cents, my two cents is free .A nuisance, who sent, you sent for me? Ford Escape before me moves ahead to booth under a chorus of pigeon coos. From overhang, mottled pigeon flutters to ground before my car. Three head bobs it proclaims, I said, this looks like a job for me. So everybody just follow me.

          Border barrier arm
          sways in wind, Pigeon lands
          struts past booth.





They Shall Know Us By Our Motion
          after Jr Jr.s “If You Didn’t See Me (Then You Weren’t on the Dance Floor)”


When the ancestors fled Lenapehoking they hauled our relations bones across the mountains and brought them to dance before in the Big House on the new territories. Taken out at least once per year, they would return in shared dance from the great white way. You are supposed to surrender to the bass. You are supposed to blend into this place. Think of these moves as she strikes the forms new eddies and currents atop the Cobo Hall rooftop garage. This her homeland, this the air, winter earth she and her ancestors pull their movements from. Her eyes on me now that says you aren’t there for the noise. But these moves and the welcome that comes on in the earnest moments between and you hear in her gestures that you are supposed to pull her like the sun pulls the earth. Dance with her in those rooftop parking lot. Understand that the river flows and traffic moves clear and lonely down Atwater past the shell of an old hockey arena. And up here, it’s all views, and the white hush of persistent wind. And her dancing into the rush and noise of it all. You should know by now that we are just gonna keep on moving on.

                     Orange monorail car
          floats past Joe Louis skeleton.
          iron spine frames passage.





Engine Block Love at All Night Coney Island
          after the Detroit Cobra’s “Hittin’ on Nothing”


Before us, a city that approaches creation with engine block love. Each of its movements the result of metal on metal collisions, each with growing entropic heat, brattles in, releases in Ford Avenue traffic. Late night parade of taillights between suburban tavern stops, late night pot dealer runs, and the hot clumsiness of dark bedrooms with the right type of strangers. This the back story to the Bell’s Two-Hearted fueled moves I make on the improbable brunette with the cardinal arm sleeve. She answers my moves with a look that speaks to third law  thermodynamics and the soft way strong women answer “you can keep your sweet talk.” National Coney Island dinner stools our post-bar early morning anchors to a world that shall move behind closed eyelids. Two plates of coney detritus and in the glimmer of food cooled blood, I can hear in a cockeyed smile and arched back tease, you ain’t hittin on nothing unless you got something for me.

                     Pies orbit around
                     fluorescent light tubes. Two
          sugar pie slices, removed.






D.A. Lockhart is the author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019), Wenchikaneit Visions (Black Moss Press, 2019), and Breaking Right (Porcupine's Quill, 2020). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Belt. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.