Detroit

These days, the plants are overtaking the plants,

abandoned factory packing centers overgrown

with ivies and moss. Kids on TikTok filming buildings

where people were made to be machines, assembling

a living from the parts of cars. You can say industry

plant here and mean Packard, and mean crabgrass,

and mean Reagan’s crack cocaine in Black lungs

since the 80s. Down South, a teen could call you

green as hell and not mean the color of rust or vines

breaking vacant sweatshop walls—growing for God

knows how long. Green, not for youth, or ecological

consciousness, but green because you’ve done one

of us wrong, shady as a wing-seeded sycamore on a record-

setting summer day. Green as in you really won’t lend me

that twenty? Green as in you’ve eaten up so much

and left nothing for my hunger. Green, you refuse

to ease anyone’s living but your own. I say invasive

species and mean yards of weeds redressing blighted

homes; we invasive species say green and mean lead

in our water from Flint to West Virginia, green the hue

of Great Lakes’ pollution-induced algal blooms—I’ll stop

here. I can’t remember its graffiti, stories, rhythm,

or winds too big to fit description without seeing

everything green this city, the many, still let happen to us.