South High

Driving the scenic way through the city

from the ballgame, past the office, the warm

urbane waft through gapped windows.

Doors locked tight, two hands on the

wheel and no turn signals. White knuckles

dragging in the neon.

Passing through colossal brick and glass limbs,

an empire of light, glitzy bars purging

and devouring assholes, speaking

in laughter and social chants, peacocking.

Drunken bridesmaids walking, heels in hands,

yelling vulgarities, louder than the radio.

Circled by rubberneckers, wolves on caustic wheels.

They die in the rearview. Don’t be them, I say.

She smiles and buries her face in her hands.

Please, I add. She opens them to see

Black ladies in bright skirts, large as hippopotamuses

wailing enticements to cars, waving, with bags

over worn bare brown shoulders.

Their voices are birdsongs, sirens

blazing past the car. We submit briefly

to the curb lane as words trail away, red eyes of brake lights.

There is a string of buses the City runs at closing time

with only one or two early riders with their

heads snailed against the large windows thinking of home,

a bed, broken hearts, lovers lost in night. A wallet, or

a watch, a phone, gone. There’s no lost and found in gutters.

There is a donut shop up the street in the ghetto

German Jews once owned, but now that is a

wasteland, some brick remnants stayed on to

become law offices, or antique parlors, a diner,

a car dealership or two with spray-painted plywood signs,

and beat up machines. A homeless man, the color of soot,

pushes a wire cart of cans and years past a funeral home.

It crumbles here where the sidewalks end.

A blurry hooker with a paper skirt, skin, wandering,

pale as the moon that is swallowed.

Don’t stop at red lights, I tell her. Look, then go.

Can we stop for a donut? she replies.

We already passed it. And we had ice cream

at the game. Okay. But are they good?

The best in town. Next time, I said. We turn

onto the black highway to home, almost

missing the eyes on the rusted water tower

that never close.