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by Perry Janes Orchids in the bio-dome. Burnt chassis on the street. I’m walking between sewer grate cloches rilled with steam in a friend’s back alley on Detroit’s east side. It’s night. I describe the land so you understand when I write I pause and say “What a moon” to the speedboat in the lawn, the windows graffiti’d God God God you know I’m not bullshitting. There’s a speedboat in the lawn. There are Gods written on the houses. It’s all one violent collage, isn’t it? Even flowers mobbing the fence line (hydrangeas, I think) and the neighbor I’m told rises each Sunday to pour crematorium ash from John and Jane Does into nail-drawn furrows. Their off colored petals. Her prayer. I hadn’t known it worked like this: roots responding to acid in the loam, blossoms burning pink and blue and red. Would you believe I grew from boy to man without once digging knuckle-deep in soil? I hold little warmth for what dirties my knees. So it surprises me when I stoop to the ground, cup a nearby bloom, pick a dead fly’s wing from its anther, lean close, and— The last thing I want is to pluck the flowered stem I had nothing to do with planting or caring for, never watered from the garden hose or shook awake on a cold school morning with a thermos of cocoa already steaming, that I never, not once, noticed as it walked down the street with headphones rattling at their poorly glued seams a bass line pronouncing i am here i am here i am here i am here i am here. That I only now know to admire. Just one petal. That’s all I take. And like the wafer I never ate at school mass, all that business of the body not really the body, I place it on my tongue and chew. Confess: you’ve wanted to believe this silly theater, to sieve another person’s grief against your teeth, sorrow stored in arterial valves, filtered by liver and gallbladder, the million small assignments of muscle that keep us functioning until one day— It isn’t the taste that gets me but the color, that sudden red leaking from my lips. Red that calls back memories of knuckle and gravel, skinned palms on bathroom tile, my boyhood head split behind the ear. Is there anything more tender than being a child bent at the enamel basin? Knees to the floor. Pruned to the nape. Some man picking dirt from your blood.  photo by Benjamin Dell Perry Janes is a writer and filmmaker from Metro Detroit, Michigan. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, The Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, and others. A recipient of The Pushcart Prize and the AMPAS Student Academy Award, he lives in Los Angeles, California, where he is a creator in the inaugural Imagine Impact Program and an MFA candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson College. |