Even the scrapyard’s upscale now，with its flag-spangled marquee, the husks of junked carsbarred off like a gated community                                                                           or the White House—huddling before the newly christened Innovation District‘sclutch of corporate offices, and Jet’s Pizza.                                                                                            Lately, M-59 and Ipass each other like strangers, hundred-thousand-dollarmonuments and signage posing                                                                      in the median like thirsty policeor a billboard sequence, rapt in praise of a mattress no oneis permitted to sleep on.                                                \\                                                                  Beside my Honda, cut scenesof a hundred films wake suddenly into speech: here, the empty lotwhere once my father’s favorite bakery                                                                                     slung rolls fraughtwith cigarette smoke and cinnamon, nothing left now but a namecalling out from the aisles                                                          of wholesale clubs and groceries,and here, the Coney Island where my child used to cede our quartersto prize pods every other month                                                                    in exchange for rubber dinosaursand sticky hands, which lately has renounced its heritageto become another faceless Bar & Grill.                                                    \\                                                                    Lately, I can’t stop making lists,as though exhaustive cataloging might explain, somehow,what it means that I am from here                                                                              but can’t afford a home here,in the capital city of controlled entrance. Because to namea thing can be a way to claim it,                                                                      I take as much as I can carryand run, until the catalog overwhelms my capacity to shapeor make sense of the narrative:                                                                  Dawn Donuts, debris, Rock-a-Billy’s,debris, Farmer Jack, debris. Only Trinity Lutheran still persists,the final vestige of old Hall Road—                                                  \\                                                                  The thirty-five-foot-tall golden halo,steel frame coated in aluminum, is wedged before Michigan’s deadliestintersection. It has no history,                                                                 pyrite glare obscuring border patrolheadquarters, Lakeside Mall, and a thousand offices that don’t carewhat populates them                                                 any more than wrapping paper. Roadside,two men with shovels maneuver a struck raccoon into a garbage bagas cars approach, and swerve.                                                                Whatever was here beforeTarget doesn’t care. The drive trains of one hundred thousandvehicles per day don’t care.                                                  \\                                                                  At the food court Magic Wok,my son, fidgeting, knocks his cup of milk across the takeout boxI’ve bought for us to share.                                                           While I dry the table, he goes to worksopping up soaked rice and chicken, asks me how much can we save?It’s fifty years since Neil Armstrong                                                                              set foot on the moon, one handredsince the advent of the assembly line, and a dozen mall birdsroot under tables for garbage                                                                meant for nests up in the skylights,a shoot of grass stands through the cracked tile of the fountaindrained of water, and all of its lucky pennies.