Untitled by Richard Hanus
Packard
Selen Frantz
I.
Dimes an hour, times sixty.
Stomachs full and chassis made–
if you squint, this
is almost living.
II.
Wind whistles through concrete ribs as the final men trickle out, carrying their steel and enamel.
They fidget with authorization cards in hands blackened by solder, letting them fall from empty
pockets and into piles where the Us and As and Ws chatter back and forth as they remember the
rumble of the foundry.
III.
We stumble over the barrier and into a world only remembered by forbidden feet and the nozzle
of a spray can. Our words fill the air around us, bouncing off the flat walls and down the
mile-long track rooms, past the shuttered offices, the piles of electronics and stolen vans, the
broken glass, the puffer jackets, the bubble letters and profanity, the unintentional skylights, and
the place we always take pictures.
I remind you that my great-grandfather worked here before the draft, before getting gassed out
on the western front, before returning to the foreman like a wounded dog, before coughing his
lungs out in a bar at age fifty, only two blocks from where he was born and had lived in a
urethane haze.
We kick a piece of concrete down the stairs and hear it disappear into the deep stone artery.
IV.
From the grass and reclaimed nature on Palmer and Concord,
we clasp our jackets tighter and see the cranes sway and dance,
dipping the rusted beams and their long tresses to the floor.
Men in sun-yellow shout
though these words have lost their echo
and to the drum of a countdown
they scatter like rats lost
in the troughs of the assembly line.
In one deafening motion, the world opens
its shaking mouth to overcast skies.
Selen Frantz is an urban planner from Detroit and is currently the William T. Battrick Poetry Fellow at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in Lucky Jefferson, BarBar, Meniscus, Prime Number Magazine, ellipsis, and elsewhere.
Richard Hanus had four kids, but now just three. Zen and Love.