Soluble Futures: Flint — Locust Review

My alarm clock is deafening.
I swear its tiny gears
vibrate my bed,
lulling me into sleepless paralysis.

I can measure dread
rising with the gray sun.
Counting the seconds...

Click-click.
Click-click.

. . . . 16,521 . . . .
. . . . 16,520. . . . 519 . . . .
Click-click.
Here they come.
Specters crawling out of my skull.
More vivid than any nightmare, rehearsed in front of me
while I’m frozen in bed.

Buildings
like hulking corpses.
Machinery
rusted motionless.

Nasty things breeding in the stopped gears,
climbing down the building’s sides...

* * *

Once, we made those buildings hum. First we took Fisher Body Numbers 2 and 1. They said auto would never go union. That we were too shifty and unreliable. That’s what they said.

They. There’s always a They. The They that sent in, first the cops, then the National Guard, and that signed the Pinkertons’ checks. GM, the politicians, the newspapers whining about halted lines, bitten hands, the rhythms of commerce that had been brought to a standstill.

They acted like the plant was theirs. That we were theirs. Just an appendage of the assembly line to move around like another lever. Speed up. Speed up. Faster. Always faster. Your swollen hands melt into the wrenches and screws. Faster. Speed up. Speed up. Faster.

Two days before the New Year, we pulled the switch. Threw the foremen over the fence. Fisher Body 1 belonged to us: the scum, the rabble, easily disposed. We ran it.

* * *

What does a ghost look like
when it was never alive?

When it could only move
thanks not to its own will
but to the grip of your hand,
the push of your muscle.

Click-click.
And when the push
stops,

when metal
oxidizes,

when homes
rot,
where does it haunt?

. . . . 9,150 . . . . 49 . . .

Where, after it climbs out
of the closed gap,
does it have left to exist?

And how complicit are you
for not taming it decades earlier?

* * *

We met, voted. Organized security, picket duty, food, recreation. We elected positions. I was the Mayor of Fisher Body 1. Biggest car body plant in the world. A brick and mortar building, holding within it a sprawling future of highways, now ours to hold and reshape.

And I was mayor of it. Beholden to my constituents. Fellow workers. Hundreds of us. Thousands. Us who had been hired from the neck down. Who were called by items of clothing or punch card numbers rather than our given names. Who just months before would be dragged by the ear to the nearest window to stare at the unemployment office up the street before being shoved back onto the line.

It felt unfamiliar to sit on an unattached car seat, and read. Just read. Or chat. Or nap. Or play cards. No clock bearing down on us. No control over our arms and legs other than our own brains. Unfamiliar. And wonderful. Exhilarating. Happy New Year.

Up the road we heard the emergency brigades. Our wives, mothers, daughters, in their red berets and armbands, bobbing up and down. Taunting the bulls with wooden batons. Turning Chevrolet Avenue into a human mosaic. Unbent. Refusing to go back to a home that shrank against human touch.

* * *

When steam and ice meet,
steam wins.

The minutes or hours
it took to freeze
are stripped away
in seconds.

Wafting from exposed pipes
rising out of the ground,
it settles and melts
the cleansing snow
that covers playgrounds.

Filth exposed,
enduring.

. . . 5,998 . . . .

New years carry with them
what wasn’t washed away.

Playing children never notice
the grime sticking to their skin.

Mold,
harvested
from the ceiling of the school gymnasium,
falling onto your kids’ paper.

* * *

Together we made bulls run. The shouts and chants, the crash of broken glass, the clatter of teargas canisters on walls. Gunshots. Clubs colliding with bone.

We weren’t afraid. Not of eviction notices or guns pointed in our faces. When all that is on the other side of them is a broken body and cowed soul, how can you have room for fear? And in the February snow, the bitter wind, we did battle.

It was a ruse. A decoy. As the brawl on the avenue died down, the emergency brigades marched in the direction of Chevrolet 4. The largest engine plant in the world. When the cops and thugs got wise to it they marched themselves over. The women held the line. Pushed back as hard as they could. Until we were able to push the final scabs and cowards back through the gate and re-lock it. No bulls got in.

Chevrolet 4 was stopped. Unmoving. No engines built. A cluster of factories functioning more and more like a city. Staging ground for our imaginative hopes. A pregnant reminder that we could destroy and create on our own terms.

They gave us what we wanted then. Better pay. Recognition of the union. The right to say “slow” when they said “fast.” And that was it. The mightiest industrial corporation on the planet. Whipped to its knees. General Motors: knuckled under. It took five weeks. We stretched our victory banner across the front of Chevrolet 4.

* * *

Click-click.
. . . . 4,001 . . . .

What do you do when you can’t sell the house?

When you can hear
the water rushing beneath it
turning brown with lead?

When it crawls down your child’s throat
and nestles into the soft tissue
of their brain?

When they shake
with fevers and fits,
possessed?

When crusty old men
see this
and shrug?

. . . . 1,324 . . . .

Screams
out of a Greek myth,
accommodated,
new pillars and marching orders
growing around them
like a vein adjusts to scar tissue.

* * *

The parade stretched through the city’s streets. We marched and danced and chanted and clapped and hollered. We hugged our children, kissed our loved ones, lit off fireworks. The thoroughfares weren’t clogged anymore with people shuffling between work-without-life and homes-without-hope. They were fields of the wide open possible, spreading upward and outward, as far as our own minds could carry the town’s outer limits.

Those were the mornings of different visions. Those hours before the sun came up. No counting seconds then. Just visions of human beings singing in unison with tears streaming down their faces.

Whispers of men and women killed under red and black flags didn’t just fade into the background. Their names were inscribed in the sky. Headlines from other barricades in Spain, of armed sharecroppers in Alabama. All swirled and twisted themselves into our daily lives, pulling away from the grind of mechanized assembly.

These are the visions that smile back to you, that unstick the wrench form your hands. The nameless legends that link arms and ask you for the details to relay twenty, thirty, forty years down the line. Detroit. Barcelona. Birmingham. Soweto. Algiers. Havana. Prague. Maps of future histories living in our minds, reaching out, finding touchpoints.

* * *

There’s no room for celebration
inside these new visions.
Joy evaporates.
Infections spread.

And that same hungry ghost
of the never-living,
the never-born,
never-was,
the deflected specter which,
with no place left to go,
haunts everything.

. . . 748 . . . .

I see Henry Ford smirking
as he hands our sons and daughters
his Protocols,

A newspaper headline:
“Last International Brigades Vet,
Dies at 96.”

Knight sticks

braced across countless throats
gargling in unison,
unable to breathe.

A city transformed into a fortress:
vacant apartments
and streets of bones.

Last laughs,
raised glasses,
burning forests,
rising seas.

I see glittering steel beams

. . . . 473 . . . .