Flint Michigan / Once Buick City
An Obsolete Circuit Still Burning
About the art
This is a photographic collage I manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. It portrays obsolete technology that is still functioning and trying to fulfill its purpose.
About the poem
The title, Knob and Tube refers to an outdated system of electrical wiring that uses no ground wires. It is incompatible with modern systems and is considered dangerous; not only because of its age, but because there are many exposed wires hidden in the walls.
For the poem, I have used the idea of a current moving through a system to describe the declining life of a woman. She lives in Flint, Michigan (Buick City), a town where a once thriving auto industry is now dead and gone. She dwells in her past because she knows nothing else.
Knob and Tube
Weeds muscled
like inmates crumble
foundations
once Buick City.
Wired from a pole
to a grey clapboard house,
currents of bees
through the neighbor's
wild cherry.
With nothing to do
she sits like
her husband
with a fist on the step.
Her pace-maker bump
is hidden beneath
a Simplicity blouse.
Her bruises are
floral tattoos.
A nephew cashes
her checks, arrives
in his Japanese car
with groceries
and e-cigarettes.
A bright orange extension
connects the TV to
an uncovered socket.
She rests in the sag
of a La-Z-Boy chair,
inhales
an electrical vapor.
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Poetry is both very romantic, I really want to read it and I give all the poems you 1000% it may not be enough. I love all your poem, so evocative of its reading
Thanks @curiesea I am thrilled that you take the time to read them and find them enjoyable.
Another well structured and thought out piece of writing. I got a sense of the past fading, the future moving on regardless. Enjoyed it.
Thanks @naquoya, as I get older I feel a strong attachment to the past, I notice it more and more in my writing.
I'm the same. The past has a lot of stories in it, waiting to be told. I like the way you told this one.
I can really picture this woman in my mind, your words are so vivid.
I adore your collage, the light bulbs remind me of Michael Craig-Martin's paintings and metal sculptures.
Thanks @opheliafu, growing up and living in the mid-west I have a strong empathy for the hard lives people live. People who depend on factories and big business tfor jobs. I see woman like the one in this poem where ever I go, sometimes she is calloused and hard and other times the salt of the earth.
I think your experiences and observations come across in your words. I can always see the people you talk about and the places you describe. I see them in vivid colour.