Joy Road and Livernois

by Marge Piercy

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed

till we heard blood dripping in the closet.

I fell in love with a woman who could ring

all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.

But she in her cape and her Caddy

had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,

a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets

to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing,

she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,

the white thunder rolling over till nothing

hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.

I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

My name was Evie, we used to shoplift,

my giggling wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;

we picked up boys together on the corners.

The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,

sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t

no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.

Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.

It was the cleanest thing I ever held.

It was the only power I ever had.

I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.

A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-

works my mom raised nine kids. My brother-

in-law porked me while my sister gave birth,

choking me with the pillow when I screamed.

I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.

Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,

always a bigger belly than me to push around

like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill

on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,

a tumor big as a baby when they found it.

When I look in the mirror I see my mom.

Remember how we braided each other’s hair,

mine red, yours black. Now I am bald

as an egg and nearly boiled through.

I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp

knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights

through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.

It made me feel as mean as any man.

My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.

All those hot night riding around and around

when we had no place to go but back.

Those nights we raced out on the highway

faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat

like shaken soda. It shot in an arc

when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,

the knife I showed you how to use still

on its leather thong between my breasts

where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.

I did not lay down in back seats with boys.

I became a nurse, married, had three sons.

My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours

among the dying and accident cases. My husband

left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,

a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.

My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest

ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches

the soaps since the Kelsey-Hays plant closed.

Then my boy began to call me from the alley.

Every night he was out there calling, Mama,

help me. It hurts, Mama! Take me home.

This is the locked ward and the drugs

eat out my head like busy worms.

With each of them I lay down, my twelve-

year-old scrawny tough body like weathered

wood pressed to their pain, and we taught

each other love and pleasure and ourselves.

We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,

the little names. At twelve I was violent

in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,

a starving weasel, all teeth and speed

except for the sore fruit of my new breasts

pushing out. What did I learn? To value

my pleasure and how little the love of women

can shield against the acid city rain.

You surge among my many ghosts. I never think

I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-

working, attractive. Evie was brave,

Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked

sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood

polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.

I wriggled through an opening left just big enough

for one. There is no virtue in survival,

only luck, and a streak of indifference

that I could take off and keep going.

I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air

eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs

dangle and you jump and jump, where there are

more drugs than books, more ways to die

than ways to live, because I ran fast,

ran hard, and never stopped looking back.

It is not looking back that turned me

to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines

under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.

Girls who lacked everything except trouble,

contempt and rough times, girls

used like urinals, you are the salt

keeps me from rotting as the years swell.

I am the fast train you are travelling in

to a world of a different color, and the love

we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch

rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

"Joy Road and Livernois" by Marge Piercy, from Available Light. (c) Middlemarsh, 1988.