☀ Today's Poem: "Future Ruins" Andrew Collard

Even the scrapyard's upscale now,

with its flag-spangled marquee, the husks of junked cars
barred off like a gated community
or the White House—
huddling before the newly christened Innovation District's
clutch of corporate offices, and Jet's Pizza.
Lately, M-59 and I

pass each other like strangers, hundred-thousand-dollar
monuments and signage posing
in the median like thirsty police
or a billboard sequence, rapt in praise of a mattress no one
is permitted to sleep on.

\\

Beside my Honda, cut scenes

of a hundred films wake suddenly into speech: here, the empty lot
where once my father's favorite bakery
slung rolls fraught
with cigarette smoke and cinnamon, nothing left now but a name
calling out from the aisles
of wholesale clubs and groceries,

and here, the Coney Island where my child used to cede our quarters
to prize pods every other month
in exchange for rubber dinosaurs
and sticky hands, which lately has renounced its heritage
to become another faceless Bar & Grill.

\\

Lately, I can't stop making lists,

as though exhaustive cataloging might explain, somehow,
what it means that I am from here
but can't afford a home here,
in the capital city of controlled entrance. Because to name
a thing can be a way to claim it,
I take as much as I can carry

and run, until the catalog overwhelms my capacity to shape
or make sense of the narrative:
Dawn Donuts, debris, Rock-a-Billy's,
debris, Farmer Jack, debris. Only Trinity Lutheran still persists,
the final vestige of old Hall Road—

\\

The thirty-five-foot-tall golden halo,

steel frame coated in aluminum, is wedged before Michigan's deadliest
intersection. It has no history,
pyrite glare obscuring border patrol
headquarters, Lakeside Mall, and a thousand offices that don't care
what populates them
any more than wrapping paper. Roadside,

two men with shovels maneuver a struck raccoon into a garbage bag
as cars approach, and swerve.

Whatever was here before
Target doesn't care. The drive trains of one hundred thousand
vehicles per day don't care.

\\

At the food court Magic Wok,

my son, fidgeting, knocks his cup of milk across the takeout box
I've bought for us to share.
While I dry the table, he goes to work
sopping up soaked rice and chicken, asks me how much can we save?
It's fifty years since Neil Armstrong
set foot on the moon, one handred

since the advent of the assembly line, and a dozen mall birds
root under tables for garbage
meant for nests up in the skylights,
a shoot of grass stands through the cracked tile of the fountain
drained of water, and all of its lucky pennies.