Homecoming

Alone in a high-rise in Detroit sitting at a kitchen bar,
a can of something fizzy nearby.
A marching band ricochets below,
the brass and bass battering around
the concrete like elephants in an earthquake.
The last slip of golden-hour coats
a mural of a young Stevie Wonder.
It’s summer in the city but
I swear the air has a lingering
coastal scent of wet clay and kelp.

Earlier in the day
I walk Woodward and Michigan and Grand River,
these wide historical avenues that may as well be familial.
I think of the famous car shows that started
three quarters of a century ago on Woodward Drive.
I can imagine the old Cadillacs
struttin’ slowly by Sunday afternoons.

The tongue of Grand River Avenue extends all the way through
my hometown to serve as the royal red carpet
of our Jubilee and Memorial Day parades,
the backdrop for our tractor pulls
and our high school marching band.

The river running through our backyards,
which some dared to swim and fish in,
trails through the university towns over.
And so we were children to the university,
a kinship from shared water, and we memorized
its school anthem like church music,
our eyes cast to the sky,

“on the banks of the Red Cedar,
there's a school that's known to all…”

When I walk past the Detroit Tigers stadium I am overdressed,
and when I walk through the gentrified financial district I am poor.
It dawns on me that Detroit has some hills. Nothing wild,
but enough to make for a sense of rolling adventure on foot.
Must be the leftover glacial moraine from the Late Pleistocene,
knob-and-kettle topography characterized by crests and dips.

It’s weird not having an O’Reilly around
to truly feel Of this city.
Siblings who were our back-up best friends in the car.
Aunts and uncles who took us to
Eastern Market and the Motown Museum.
Parents who drove us to concerts at Cobo, Pine Knob,
The Majestic, or Saint Andrew’s Hall.
Friends we wailed lyrics with on our descent out of town.
Somehow I’ve never been alone in this city before.

I want to stay in the moment of listening
at this barstool, revel
in the Tigers’ winning roar down the block.
Yet as night descends
I’m in the backseat of a car traveling east along I-94,
always just outside the motor city,
watching taillights swish over the hill ahead and beyond,
the sky a vat of violet ink.

Record

A well-meaning new year’s resolution to

be more present begets new tasks.

We got so good at layering the day-to-day

with an oozy, amber slideshow of memories that

the film melted and became indecipherable.

Upon peeling apart,

we find three types of present.

1. Apriori, factual setting and circumstances, as though seen from an aerial view or described in third person. This one’s kind of basic, the descriptions in a screenplay to set the stage. “12 noon, campus setting, classes let out for lunch, students emptying onto the green.”
   
   
2. Minutiae, the moment to moment routines, the idiosyncratic patterns and obstacles. Now we get into first person mode. “I’m hungry and craving an everything bagel from the food truck in the green. I’ll use the walk to call my friend whom I know is also at lunch right now.”
   
   
3. Other worlds and other moments projected upon this world and this moment. It happens more than you’d think. For instance, realizing during my walk that I avoid a section on campus, and not so much because it’s near the building where suicides occurred–it IS a different building, a block down–but because it’s where I once started to talk light-heartedly over the phone with my friend, eager to hear her and energized from my bagel, curious how her own work with students was going. And for each of us being positive Pollyanas, typically upbeat and egging each other on, we found ourselves mutually shook and grim, her speaking about the active shooter that week at her nearby university and I the complicated history of suicides in this nearby campus hall. How far down in our bones must the grief sit? How many multitudes can a place contain before it swells and snaps under stress? She hung up to pick her kid up from daycare, I retreated back to work with my bagel, and the students, fed and caffeinated, went back to class.
   
   © Colleen Maynard 2011-2026