Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Eva H.D., Steeltown Rain

 


AL posted an earlier version of this poem under a different title.

Steeltown Rain

It's none of my business.
Nothing is.

 

Just another easteregg 
playoff season rain.
This rain
in solidarity
with the absent
orange groves of
Jaffa
with the teenaged ghosts
of Attawapiskat
the Ticats
the holy martyrs of north
Scarborough
with the FAS jaws
twitching down the
street and the Adidas
stripes shifting dope from
heel to wakeful heel;

 

for the nightshift’s
shattered override
for the beat cops in
the coffeeline

 

rain of garbage days of pizza
box and Budweiser,
the abortive aspiration
of old men's belts
and the yearly masochistic
parade & its cruciform grief

 

here's to life, and the
drenched gutters rising
in counterpoint
to the people
who settle in its
troughs like sediment;
who are played
like pipes or plump
pigeons, heading
for the fall.

 

Here’s to the
monster truck prams and
the swinging dicks & the
playoff fever and the stupid
pink headbands of the infants
w/ their tumorous bows;
and the kids in hoods
with ears and the
grownups in hoods
w/ ears and the
kids who died because
their shirts had hoods
and to the hoods themselves
because no one deserves
to die, no one deserves
anything — & to the boys
in the bay,
mouths gummed
up with flabby bleached
bread, prison butter
and jam 
b/c no one

 

deserves anything
but you get it anyway,
don't you, right in
the teeth,
right in the cakehole,
you get what you get.

 

~

 

Danny's ma skipped
out when he was just a
walking baby boy,
forged too many
cheques on his dad's
account, treated other
men with the cash.
You know what I'm saying?
Stole the dough and showed
those guys a nice time.
You know the drill.
When his dad went one
day to the bank and they
asked about where's all that
money gone, and he stumped his
hard finger down and said
That ain't my signature
and went home, where he
found her, no words required,
after which said I won't call
no cops and I ain't gonna
charge you and I ain't taking
back that scratch but now you
leave, you leave now get
out the fuck from this house and
when he said that also
he said And the boys
stay. And she left.

 

And Danny says fifty
some years on sucking
back a cold Molson
Canadian lager Yeah
my mother was a bitch.
But my dad was a hard
Irish bastard anyway he
beat on her and on me, too:
you get what you get.

 

~

 

So you're driving in this
pissing up a tree rain and this
footless old sock of a
man's begging & shuffling at
Parkside and Bloor just as the rain
starts to really pour and pummel
windshields and newsprint shelters
and the big, white
SUV up ahead's a humming
tension gushing hot clammyass
rain as the man's making pleading
please please faces and the light will
never change and the great white beast
purrs its robot window down,
hands over a twenty.

 

And the twenty's torque &
shine in the driving
hotknife
rain.

 

And the guy runs
for his girl under
the bridge like fuck,
let's go score.

 

And it goes on, it
went on raining all along
Lakeshore like your life
was one big

 

car

 

wash

 

rainrainrainrainrain
like it’s rain’s
graduation day
and this is its big
sendoff like pomp
& circumstance of
rain like Motown
man ain’t supposed to
cry rain
like a girl is dancing
in it that mud-ribboned
citypark lawn of used
sharps & capsized spliff
hepatitis rain, a girl
is dancing in it like all
her friends are dead
is how it rains and it rained
all along Lakeshore
that night and all
fucking March
& fucking April, too.

 

~

 

If for one day you
could drive like a car
ad.
If for one night you
could fuck like a
saint.
If the men you did
time with had a mother's
love for
you
or anyone if

 

this biblical rain
would stop –

 

 

Here's to the staggered
Listerine straight
malt-licked two-stepper
in the bikelane
stumbling into the
minuterice-white
jaws of morning

 

to the plastic bag
high 

 

the methadone
tomorrow
glow

 

the kilt-hiking
classcutters,
lipglossed puffs of
vapour & gossip &
the glint & click
of switchblade
manicures

 

to the hotboxed sedan's
woofer-rending
autotune, KO'd
taillight trailing
skunk

 

the rap-trilling
babes in arms like
spring fledglings in micro
braids and racing stripes
singing down the sidewalk
with that grade eight
grad swagger

 

the Eagles-cranking
Harley grinding
that corner again
leathers sweating hot
take it easy
dew

 

to the ones who never
got away,
squawking acrid
on their nasty old
sofas and their cigarette
stoops

 

to the bright
trauma of staying
that shines mould-lurid
off every lifer
like a halo

 

and the burp of siren
launching its pale
headlit
pablum
into the bonyshouldered
night —

 

& the rain detains
the sky
a little longer

 

— o here’s to that
or any other

 

light.
                        -Eva H.D., from her new collection, The Natural Hustle

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