ON RUINS

2010, Detroit

Blue sky peeks around half-standing
rubble. The demo crew slumps
into their lunch pails in a dusty
patch of weeds. Beauty in ruins?

Risky business. Hard hats hold
the brains in place. My artist-friend
wore one, a symbolic affectation
until the drunken night he flung it onto

the ruins and started repairing refrigerators
with his father. Will archeologists get
aroused by the endless chunks of cracked
cement sprouting rebar, dried blood,

frayed loose wires? I drive my father
to the ruins of Old Neighborhood, Detroit.
The wrecking crew had scraped it bare
of evidence, exterminating nostalgia.

Any hint of recognition hauled away.
Ghost addresses lined the empty city blocks.
Ghost mailmen and real wild gods—
I mean dogs, who chew weeds

to make them vomit. We push fingers
down our throats. My father remembers
a heat wave in the forties, houses emptying
out at night, a community of exposed

bodies seeking relief in Belle Isle Park
in the breeze across the river from Canada.
Historic plaques must attach themselves
to some thing, right? Not the naïve trees

newly planted, already dying in cement dust
amid the infections of rusty nails. Perhaps
memories consist of softer things
and a multitude of overlapping places.

This entire space, one large wordless
historic plaque. We stumble over rubble,
nostalgic for the fluid shifting of sand,
searching for context in the empty waves.

Jim Daniels received the Michigan Author Award for 2026-27. Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems was published in 2026 by Michigan State University Press. Other recent books include An Ignorance of Trees, nonfiction, Cornerstone Press, 2025, and The Luck of the Fall, fiction, 2023. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.