Radio Motown
BY DENNIS HINRICHSEN
I go back to Levi Stubbs
and the fog
when it’s spring
again
and I lie awake. Me
kissing a girl
the whole ride home,
thinking
if I pulled my lips away
I’d never get it back,
whatever
was happening. Her yes
in the dark
feeding mine
as Tommy nursed the ’98
through the hair-pin turns
of autumn,
Ridge Hollow Road,
while the other Tommy
held the door ajar
and tambourined
the dash,
crying
right in time with the bass,
or left, left
as the tires
spit and the car veered, and
we stayed on the road.
Frogs still out
in the reeds
because the air was
alive. The boys
were alive.
And Mary was kissing me
back. Pulse of tail lamp.
Four Tops. Fog,
banked road,
stench of swamp… And then
I was home and dropped
at that house by the lake.
Taste of her lips on my lips,
the boys’ voices swept
to mist in my head—
they would be dead in the
spring, I would crawl
unhurt over their beyond-
hurt bodies—
I sat alone in
the kitchen in the same
radio dark
and guided by
the singing,
pitched
them all the curved road home.
