By Jim Daniels
Trailer Park Stew
A trailer park is a semi-permanent or permanent area for mobile homes or travel trailers. ... Trailer parks, especially in American culture, are stereotypically viewed as lower income housing whose occupants live at or below the poverty line, have low social status and lead a desultory and deleterious lifestyle.
Unlike regular houses, they do not appreciate over time because they are not built to last.
I sliced my fuck-you finger last night
cutting carrots for a watery stew.
Three trailer parks in the old neighborhood
on the Eight Mile edge of Detroit competed for
bragging rights, and how to define them
for the outside world of band-aids and pie charts.
Perhaps their muddy roads are paved now.
Or potholed. Perhaps back to the rocky rubble
of memory scrapes. No first aid
for the endless unspoken wounds
tattooed into existence. Ancient
mercurochrome in the rusty medicine chest.
Orange mirage of healing.
In an upscale college classroom
a kid said trailer park, and the room
recoiled like the one small earthquake
I lived through, in Ohio of all places.
I bit my lip and bled.
*
Faultless neat spikes of trailers
extended off the main spine
like a hearty but flowerless plant.
Mobile home, I wanted to say.
When you've got three in walking distance,
nobody's joking or invoking the blasphemous
alliteration of trailer trash. Trash lives
everywhere, but especially in mansions,
we believed with the faith of the excommunicated
chewing their last communion wafers.
*
I lived in Qatar one long searing summer
surrounded by three skyscrapers going up,
simultaneously scraping. Richest country
in the world. Guest workers bused in
from crowded concrete desert camps
far from the shiny metal city
climbed those silver-skinned structures,
anonymous ants in blue overalls, crawling
over high steel for fugitive scrapes, sometimes
falling into the nightmare of forever. One man
replaced the other. One shift replaced the other.
Lined up at Western Union, they wired home
money without the currency of words.
*
On cold gray snow-blast Midwest days
like this, lost in mid-March, even a siren
seems to struggle, erratic in the distance.
In this salt-box house, I long for
that confined trailer, perfect rectangle
of a life contained. How did I get here
in middle-class America
with my dull knife?
*
At Ford's we wore tan overalls
and did little climbing
in that oily steel darkness. At least
we could live where we wanted
within the city limits of reason.
We rely on passive voice spiked
with curses, unable to name those
in the Heights or Hills of privilege.
We leave our referents obscure,
unable to put the star on top
of the skeletal mirage of a tree.
*
Margins as small as the space
between trailers, so, yes,
sometimes a coffin emerged
from the weighted silence
of pooled blood on flood-lit nights
of proximity. Space, a luxury item
untaxed by salt-stains of sweat
and melted snow. Rage does not
travel well, overinflating quickly
into nearby explosions
and their endless echoes
of hollow distrust.
*
Nostalgia for fairness
differs from nostalgia
for poverty. I'm not sure
I believe that, but I tell
it to myself. 72 feet x 15 feet.
Mobility in the wallet
of the beholder. Jokes about
tornadoes flattened everything.
*
These days, I try to avoid using
my fuck-you finger. I lack
the proximity and willpower
to follow-up. And the strength.
A little blood in the stew?
Tolerated, even welcome.
*
What was I saying about weather?
Afternoons, we leaned into shallow
shadows of summer sun against
the last trailer in the row
facing the slivered metal dust
outside the tool & die shop
next door. One summer
I worked there. You can't beat
the commute, I joked. No one
laughed, but I kept repeating it.
*
A lot of code in our language.
As if decoding brings shame.
Is there another way to buy
our way out that doesn't
involve cash? Trailer Park
Stew, the recipe is called.
Add blood at your own risk.
Detroit Dreams
I shoot my cap gun. My dog recoils, bounces off the fence. I’m snorting gunpowder like I’d snort coke in another ten years if I’m eight then. If I had enough money to buy some. If I was desperate enough to trust my brother not to rip me off and it was late at some party and all the pot, speed, booze, and whatever that had turned the hours to ashes was gone and I wanted to rub two sticks of dynamite or just stick them up my nose and light a match. The dog is going to take a chunk out of Reggie Mackey’s wrist for payback. My dog loves me so I can shock him and he won’t bite. My brother made me flinch. I loved him so I didn’t bite. The grass bare and patchy from shit. We’re supposed to take turns shoveling it. I’m not calling it shit yet. Just moving from poop to crap. The dog’s on his way out. He doesn’t see the big picture beyond the snapshot of that fenced-in yard with burnt grass, dandelions and clover. Our father hacks back the wild roses every year just like he buzzes off our hair. Leaves the thorns. The horns. Cap guns to BB guns. And so on. Reggie crashed his minibike into a delivery truck and got delivered outta here. One last twitch before he went. Red rolls of caps and a hammer on the sidewalk. Pow. Pow. Pow. Ten years later on the assembly line, sending off sparks. Nobody flinching.
Jim Daniels’ latest book of poems is Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press. Other recent books include The Perp Walk and RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music (2020), co-editor, M. L. Liebler. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.