Cruising in the Motor City — Split Lip Magazine

Last night I spoke to James Baldwin. We were sitting in a confession booth that was also a glory hole. I asked him if we keep finding each other here because God only likes to be looked at through a gap in the wall. A voyeur of little things, pimples on asses. Is He too big to get small with me? Standing alone in a Ford factory, I followed the assembly line into the river. Emerged on Woodward Avenue. When I couldn’t find where I parked the Torino, I prayed to the DTE Energy angel. Detroit rang so loud pipes burst up and down the street and I passed out: my lead rain, heaven-sent city came onto me while I slept. I awoke with it smeared across my cheek, smelling like peroxide water pumps. Stared at myself in the gravel of a pothole. Narcissus without socks. Missing shirt buttons. From my pant leg I picked off burrs that were forged in the dirt—not grown—but beaten into something worth singing about. I sang. I stood and kissed the payphone. I wanted those metal shins in my gut, plutonium church pews spread out, corroded battery wires in my mouth. Plugged. Now what. I listen to cylinders humming a promise to finish me. There’s something new over there, they preach, beyond the chain-link. An atom bomb the size of Jesus’s love. You just gotta survive long enough.

Alex Bortell (@alexbortell) is a Chicago-based poet. He has received support from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop and was a runner-up for RHINO’s Founders’ Prize and phoebe’s Greg Grummer Prize. His work also appears or is forthcoming in Foglifter, the Mississippi Review, the Stonecoast Review, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere.