William Heath
Urban Renewal in Detroit
GM wanted land in Detroit
for a central industrial park
to employ six-thousand workers—
Poletown was the target.
Graffiti appeared on the walls
of demolished buildings,
“Death to Arsonists, Thieves,
and GM.” Proud people
refused to leave, city services
declined, then disappeared,
crime was on the rise.
A SWAT team drove the last
protesting squatters out
of Immaculate Conception,
which was taken down in days.
In place of Poletown the city
built the world’s largest
resource recovery plant,
in other words it burned
a hell of a lot of trash,
turning it into energy.
It seemed like a good idea.
The problem was pollutants
poured out of the stacks,
spreading carcinogens
across the neighborhood.
“We all live downwind,”
was the protestors’ slogan.
When the plant failed
to show a profit the city
sold it to Philip Morris,
who supposedly promised
to deal with the problem
of smoke causing cancer.
William Heath is the author of the poetry collections Night Moves in Ohio (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and The Walking Man (Icarus Press, 1994); the novels Devil Dancer (Somondoco Press, 2013), Blacksnake’s Path: The True Adventures of William Wells (Heritage Books, 2008), and The Children Bob Moses Led (Milkweed Editions, 1995), winner of the Hackney Literary Award. His history text, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), won Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America for best historical nonfiction book and best first nonfiction book. He is also the author of Conversations with Robert Stone (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), a collection of interviews. His poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, South Carolina Review, and Southern Review, among other publications. The William Heath Award is given annually to the best creative writer at Mount St. Mary’s University, where Heath is a professor emeritus of English. He lives in Frederick, Md.
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