Summer of nineteen seventy-something, somebody’s little sister has a baby. We all drive the sixty miles of Metro artery into Detroit’s sooty heart to see for ourselves. Blazing full-blown daylily summer, bulldozers pulling up malls in the immigrant fields, four or five long-haired girls in a Mustang, windows down and wailing to Marvin Gaye you know we’ve got to find a way to bring some loving here today One of us now an aunt with a big stuffed dog in a carful of big stuffed hungover heads with freshly shampooed bangs. All of our fathers are drinking men father, father everybody thinks we’re wrong and all of our mothers are lousy cooks. All of us girls wear pink lip gloss and smoke Kool Kings. Whose father makes the basement wine, the clear corn liquor we siphon and sweeten with 7-up and cherries? Whose mother makes the borscht and bitter cabbage rolls? Whose father knocks whose mother down the stairs? Whose father gets laid off and lets the lawn grow back to prairie? Whose mother hangs the Christ heart stuck with thorns on the kitchen wall above the stove? Take this and eat and the spiders hatch in vacuum cleaner bags. And we lift the new child up in the swaddling light of Henry Ford General Motors where his mother will spend the bright coins of her teens her twenties her thirties her forties mother, mother, mother there’s far too many of you crying somebody’s mother says girls get that straggly hair out of your face, hold up your heads.
Pamela Gemin is the author of two poetry collections Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers and Another Creature.
She is also the editor of three poetry anthologies, including Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boomer Generation. Her poems and anthologies have been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Writer's Almanac.
