Alyssa Jewell: Finding Home

        	after the Heidelberg Project
 
Say you've got your ear pinned to the linoleum
because your toes are blistered with gravel, you're hot,
and the fan is whispering
 
sweet anythings into your brain.
The cat's toenails rattle the ground and soft echoes
 
of a somewhere else pulse into your ear drum. 
This is not the first time you think you don't belong here,
or at the very least that you should unstick yourself from the grime,
 
but you're not above it. Later in the day you will find yourself
on the other side of the state. This is a good place to begin.
 
You see a shopping cart pinned to the top
of a sawed off oak tree in the middle of Detroit,
chain link fence caked with shoes spray-painted white,
silhouette of a melted doll riding a jet ski on the edge
 
of a grass lot matted in circles of primary paint. 
Your niece is six and wants to cradle the charred mermaid
in her hands and when you remind her not to touch it,
 
she says this is freaky and wanders down the sidewalk
toward her parents. She is your godchild and
this is the closest you will ever come to knowing innocent affection
 
as you sign the panel of yellow corner house, drop
your dollar in the jar. The woman who owns the home
seems cheerful enough and you think you could be happy
 
most anywhere, that it might do you some good to follow
the river in your own backyard the next time it floods,
but then the woman begins
 
some minor chord melody, her account of cooking eggs in the microwave,
Mother's Day mornings wrapped in tinfoil and sunflowers,

and how her hard-ass neighbors are still here in 2015,
riding it out on their porch swings.  You watch them watching
the green fields that look as though they could empty
 
into some gold mining ghost town, some Paris of the West.