Brittany Rogers

UPBRINGING

In an alternate version of this story
I grow up in Denver, Colorado, fenced in
by calcareous mountains and thread-thin air. Who might
I have become had we driven eighteen hours overnight to flee
the Red Zone, Chiron lighting the sky, Detroit’s bass chasing behind?
I imagine Denver homes are large. Ivy clings to the wall
like sap. I imagine I could have walked to school unguarded, no knife
pressed to my ankle in fresh Js my mama wouldn’t buy in the City.

Once the factories stripped the grass of its green, she was willing to leave
her mama on Jane Street and my aunties scattered from Cadieux to Van Dyke.

A diamond band convinced her to stay, but she models
what could still become of me: slips and stockings,
subdivisions, propriety. I could have run when I had the chance
but I’m a daughter of the East Side, that old girl set in her ways.

I grew a mouth like the grown men in my hood. Bouquet of tattoos
across my shoulders. Where brown hair was, a field of watercolors.
 

BLACKOUT, AUGUST 2003, DETROIT

It was one of the biggest power outages that the U.S. ever saw. At first, people were worried it was an act of terrorism, but when the blackout was confirmed as merely a power outage, the mood shifted.

—MICHIGAN RADIO NEWSROOM

The grills turn up. Somebody speakers
serenade all our porches, and we jam,
smoke-soaked and lawless, all open
hormones and this powerless field.
What is it about the end of the world,
makes you think you are owed
an explanation? From God. From
your mama. From the boy who ghosted
months ago, when the air became
more steam than breeze, his number
still memorized and half-dialed each evening.
You would chase him down, make him answer
to you while the streetlights are silent,
but this block, this city, don’t know
how to tell us apart in the daylight—
done swallowed whole bodies before
this night, ripe for disappearing.