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.