by Petra Kuppers
No one has driven over the bridge in years, but it is still there on the flats. . . .
There, on the bottom of Ford Lake, is where it rests today.
—James Mann, local historian, MLive
At night, the Ford Lake Dam still hums.
Old Hydro buzzes in his sleep, jumps shivers down deformed bullhead catfish
spines.
Deep beneath, the Sauk Indian Trail remembers soles that anchored river to the
land—tramp, climb, traverse—footprints chime from fort to village, trade post,
friend.
Cyanobacteria now whisper the messages in blue-green sibilants: spill, spill, this made thing, earth dam, iron suspension, tremble on the land. We will we will we will run away and rush and cleanse and sweep away sandstone, metal shavings, Fordite scraps of car color lacquered in layers, this palimpsest of racy longings, ram shiny fins in baby blue and rose that parade on Sunday down Depot Town.
The factory presses rectangles onto the rusty earth.
Ant workers crawl into chocolate cake segments layered next to the lake.
Air intake valves pierce the rain sky.
Tonight, close by, the Ypsilanti Ford Motor Plant lassos a sine wave of power: kick
the starters, traverse voltage regulators, jump ignition coils.
All tune—fish, soil, iron, tiny algae—till brake cylinders caress and channel all
energy to the tomb.
Listen to the poem here:
Ford Lake Hydro Dam. Photo credit: Stephanie Heit.
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Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil, bringing together life and death (2024). Her Gut Botany (2020) was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library. She teaches at the University of Michigan, was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a current Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026). She co-directs Turtle Disco, a queer/crip somatic writing space in Ypsilanti/online, with her wife, poet Stephanie Heit.
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This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, an Washtenaw-based poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
