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IRE

    Alvin Brewer, former Ford autoworker (Detroit, MI)

    I’m from Virginia. Gasburg, Virginia.
    And I heard that the plants were hiring,

    so what I did, I came up here
    for a New Year’s party.

    And after I went to the New Year’s party,
    I didn’t ever go back.

    I went to the Ford Motor Company
    because they were hiring. That was
    the 3rd of January, 1969.

    My first job was working in the engine plant,
    where they build the motors at.

    I just came up here to a New Year’s party
    and got this job and never go back.

    They have the motors hanging on a line,
    and they’d be passing through,
    so one guy turns the crank,

    one guy put a piston in,
    then you turn the crank again,
    and another guy put a piston in.

    Yeah, they go on down the line
    like that. Then when it get out
    to another part of the line,

    they lay the motor down,
    they put the heads on,
    spark plugs in.

    And then it gone on out—
    they turn the motor over,

    put the oil pan on,
    keep on down the line.

    When the motor get to the back,
    they be ready to start it up.

    They hook up the hoses
    and the gas line, start it up

    right there, less than half an hour.
    When I would go on break, sometimes

    I would go back there, watch them guys
    hook the hoses up and start em up,
    cause I used to like to hear them started up.

    All that blue fire be shooting out of there
    when the motor first started, cause they

    ain’t got no pipes on it.
    Sound real loud, that blue fire
    from the exhaust system.

    Once they put that carburetor on there,
    they just pour the gas, hook the gas line up,
    hit the accelerator a couple of times,

    and there you go. Start right up.
    They started it without the body.
    The engine don’t be in the body yet.

    I just came up here to a New Year’s party
    and got this job and never go back.

    Man they were having so much fun.
    Back then, I didn’t want to go back.

O UTSIDE THE A BANDONED P ACKARD P LANT

    closed fifty-four years, the crickets
    are like summer, are like night

    in a field, but it is daytime. It is August.
    There is no pastoral in sight—only

    Albert Kahn’s stripped factory, acres
    of busted and trembling brick façade

    so vast there must be thousands
    of crickets rubbing their wings

    beneath makeshift thresholds of PVC
    piping tangled in ghetto palm saplings

    growing through a deflated mattress top
    tossed over rusted industrial metal the shape

    of an elephant dropped on its knees
    dispensing invisible passengers into

    moats of rubble dappled with what?
    These crickets, their industrious wings

    mimicking silence and song, lonely
    background, until one beat-up maroon

    Buick flies down Concord, accelerating
    like the road just keeps going, like he’ll

    actually get away with whatever he’s doing,
    then two white cop cars, Doppler sirens

    shrieking and braiding, but it is peaceful
    other than that—you might think

    you’re in the country as in not the city
    as in wilderness under the bridge that used to say

    MOTOR CITY INDUSTRIAL PARK
    and now just punched out eyes and ARK

A ND A FTER THE A RK

    The Heidelberg Project, 3600 Block of Heidelberg Street (Detroit, MI)

    what was left behind was astounding:

    dead trees wearing upside-down shopping carts on their hands
    conference call phones, black and ringless, resting on a park bench
    a pile of singleton shoes crowned with a blue plastic dump truck
    and the signs: Camel Cigarettes Pleasure to Burn $ Special Offer
    Toasted Double Melts, 2 for $4, and Yahweh scrawled everywhere

    W HY WAS THE ARK AND FLOOD NECESSARY?
    Because no one was able to catch a taxi out of Detroit.
    They were only, it turns out, cardboard cutouts.
    (take you in a taxi—God can taxi you to New York
    taxi                                 taxi)

    W HAT DOES THE ARK LOOK LIKE?
    See: America’s Greatest Manufacturing