Dear Detroit.

Sunday. 2pm. I sit in the one sports bar across from the sports stadium, which might be the most crowded scene I’ve yet to see.  I am the only customer in the bar for at least an hour.  The bartender is kind and kinder still when I pronounce my intention to make art in his city.  His city, that he has lived here for ten years.  “Too long,” he says.  A common thread.  The day is filled with touring neighborhoods, scanning lots and rows of houses screaming abandonment and arsony, others might be cut and pasted from a garden magazine.

Moving closer to downtown makes the loneliness of a place more visible.  And yet, with each factory and broken window, there is an underlying current of creativity.  This could be, this wants to shed light on that.  What if.  How long would it take.  The artist in me makes mental notes of size and height of each factory, churning numbers in my mind for loft space and funding.  What if.

“It’s a dying city,” Erin repeats.  It’s true, and it’s not.  It’s transitional.  Its innards are ripped, and being re-sewn.  I change bars.  I’m typing from a small but aging jazz bar, the mahogany wood matches the dark lighting and candlelit tables that shelter your identity over the course of the afternoon.  Soft service, soft music.  I enjoy a beet salad.  I contemplate a full service bar from the dreadlock bartender.  I write.  Not everything has died.  I watch a band of hipsters set up the stage.  We nod.  Art exists.

In preparation for tonight’s show, here are a few sketch writings I’ve been working on.  I like to think the space is speaking, and discussing it’s own experience or memoirs.

1. Building Blocks

I arrived here and nobody noticed a thing.  No one.  Not even my mother.  I was alone.  It was a sacrifice to turn out this way.  And the entire shipyard watched as I built this place brick by brick by brick.  You think I’m joking.  But I’m not.  I don’t joke.  This, this here?  No joke.  I take my work very seriously.  When a girl has to move herself over and over again, things start to turn out for the worse and all you can do is try to hold on.  It’s like your mother would say and I hope you mother says it because otherwise you have a lot of issues with you mother but a good mother would say that you have to put your feet in the ground and don’t budge for no one.  You’re a tree.  And all the little trees around you are gonna grow up.  But you’re the first one.  And whether or not you like it you have to remember that you are the root.  My mother never left the city.  She lives down the street and everybody makes fun of her because she never says nothing bad about nobody.  So everybody laughs.

2. Bones

I remember exactly who set the bones down.  It was Jake, this man off his way from Colombus.  He talked.  He talked with his hands.  Hands so big I thought they’d get stuck in the gutter.  Hands he kept printing over my bones.  I’ve got bones and nobody but Jake sees them.  Bones, he says, you are going to last for decades.  And I did.  Here I am.  Feel them.  I’m no fake.  I’ve seen it.  Seen Jake die.  Died right here.  Came here coughing, I said Jake, lie down.  Hard as dirt he was.  Die a peaceful man.  And the woman.  She comes wailing in on the morning can’t mind her own mind.  She did.  Hit me hard.  Scratched us both upright and ran a steel grate into the bones.  Alright, I said.  I decide who dies.