The Day The Tigers Came
By Christian Klaver
They creep
Through branches the color of blacktop. Leaves like shadowed knives twine around the abandoned buildings, graffiti with flaking paint and grated windows, or shadowed trees are
everywhere
now together.
It’s dark, and the open door lets in more red tinged darkness. It’s an electric-burner red that gives off no light, and the darkness isn’t night, but emptiness. The city is like a neon snow globe now, with the red coliseum in the center, the jungle-wrapped city like a perfect donut around it. Outside of that...nothing. Blackness. We don’t know why it came, or where we went or might be going. It came from nowhere, and some say it might go back there any day.
But I don’t believe it will go back. We’ll remain trapped here, the city, the jungle, the coliseum all floating together in darkness. Ember-colored coliseum leaking ember-colored tigers into the city like a spreading grassfire. No one knows what goes on inside the coliseum, but baseball seems unlikely. Concerts? Games? Gladiatorial events? I have the sense that the cats belong outside, like me. We have nothing more to do with the inside of the coliseum than we do with the world outside the blackness.
My world is here.
From The Detroit Free Press:
MUTANT PANTHERS ESCAPE FROM THE DETROIT ZOO.
Zoo officials refuse to comment, said one source close to the administration, but reports of radioactive cats prowling the suburbs of Detroit persist. One native Detroiter, Dee Biggs, claims to have lost her entire family to the phenomenon.
“I don’t mind so much about the girls,” Biggs said. “But I do miss them boys something fierce.”
In another place, another time (compared to wherever the Hell I’m at now) my front door would have let in the setting sun. That was the reason I took the crappy over-priced hovel in the first place. It was near downtown, and the door faced west, high up above the other buildings and positioned in such a way that I could sit at the little table and watch the setting sun. Now all I see is the dull ochre glow of the tigers and their home. There is no day, no night, only red-tinged darkness.
I’m sitting at my rickety little eighteen dollar Wal-Mart table with a fine point pen and fresh pad of paper, trying to write in the light of a single candle. My dress is black and light cotton and my only covering, so that my legs and arms are bare and pale in the candlelight. It’s never cold anymore, and I never liked clothes.
I’ve got some clippings for inspiration, from all of the newspapers I could find. Some from Detroit, some from the burbs, from Outside. The last one printed over a month ago. The Sixth, I think. Maybe the Seventh. I need to get something down, something on paper to pick up where they left off. But I’m not a journalist. I’m a poet, so I’ll do it my way.
A glass of Pinot Noir is on the table to loosen me up, but it’s still not coming. Poetry can be a real bitch.
shadowed trees
black and stark and unreal, a child’s diorama made with seventy-thousand miles of black construction paper, a black and white cartoon or a barbed-wire tattoo around the entire city
it’s all the same
all jungle.
I want to capture the essence and it’s not there. I finish the wine, close my eyes (though the glow is still there behind my eyelids) and let my mind wander.
I don’t know anymore how they came. Mary downstairs told me the it was a plague, like in the Bible. “Sent by God. Old Testament God and not the namby-pamby new age crap they shovel up on Woodward!” I had a hard time believing her then, and an even hard time now, since most of the parishioners of both churches, as well as Mary herself didn’t make it past the first month. I’m still here, and I’m not much of a religious role model. Never even baptized. Going down on a Jewish boy on the darkened steps of Berkley High School was the closest thing I’ve ever come to being one of the Chosen People, so my status as religious icon was questionable at best.
From The Daily Tribune:
DETROIT LOST!! TERRORIST PLOT UNSTOPPABLE!!
Despite the presidential announcement that they would "send in the troops", U.S. Forces have made little headway in improving the situation in the Motor City. “Impenetrable,” was the word the Bush administration used to describe the miles-high black wall...
Meevil from across the street thought it was a government plot. Bush and his cronies working with England. A dry run before turning the tigers on the terrorists and the French. Maybe even the Communists, too, but nobody cared as much about them any more. Being one of the last people in my neighborhood to go leant his theory a good deal of credence. Whatever else the tigers took, they seemed to gobble up bullshit faster than anything else. The city offices were the first place attacked, and soon you couldn’t find a lawyer’s office or administrative building with anyone left in it, just prowling red cats with black lolling tongues and empty eyes.
Hungry eyes that wanted filling. They didn’t eat people exactly, not the way regular tigers ate things. At least, I didn’t think so. I saw one follow the Arabic owner down the street into the BEER-WINE-LOTTO store last week. When I went in later for cigarettes: no body. No blood, no trace. There were never any bodies left, and the cats got redder and redder and the forest that grew up around Detroit got darker and thornier as the people disappeared. I think some people might have made it out before the jungle got impenetrable, and while the cats were still pale. I hoped Meevil was one of those. I’d liked him.
They creep
though the abandoned jungle, lit the color of sin, a crimson moon, Magdalene red, just a shade more dangerous than Corvette, the color of longing and lipstick, nearly forgotten embers and the carnival alligator that my father left when I was seven and he was gone. And, of course
the color of blood.
I don’t know much about how it started. The inky silhouette of the coliseum, jungle and tigers, they were all here for three days before I knew anything about it. I cross my legs as the wine warms me, fogs me, presses its sultry heaviness into me.
I’m out of cigarettes. I finger more clippings.
From The Detroit News:
RELIGIOUS DAMNATION, SAYS THE CHURCH!
Rev. Samuel Kane knows Detroit, and he knows Sodom and Gomorrah, too. “It’s about damn time!” Kane said in a meeting with...
The wine warms me, and the memory of Thursday, Friday and Saturday when my date was here. Well, ‘date’ is a strong word, but we did go on the obligatory dinner of Indian food before I brought him back to my apartment. We even skipped the drinks, bringing back a bottle of wine. One minute, he was standing up, talking about work in the morning, with me timidly hovering by. The next he was on me, grabbing a fist-full of hair, biting me hard on the neck and taking me hard and fast on the sky-blue futon in the living room that doubled as a couch. I murmured happy protests at the start, but he heard me and started to let me go, so I had to pull him back down on me and just mouth the words after that.
He called into work that morning and we did more of the same for the next three days and then (the best part) just when all the crap (pretend love, pretend lies) would have started and I would have to find a way to get rid of him by Monday, he went out for Chinese and cigarettes and I learned the world had changed. The tigers took him right out in the now-overgrown parking lot, and never even gave me a glance.
I wake
with the words “daddy hurt me”
on my lips, unspoken
and the bruises just starting to heal on my
inner thigh
All the bad things that I was expecting: a return to work, my fiancé’s accusatory return from his business trip, dinner with mom and her new boyfriend, the knowing smirk at the pharmacy were I stupidly bought both my birth control and my anti-depressants, Thanksgiving, shopping, therapy, Christmas, more shopping...all gone. The tigers took them all, and the forest took the buildings and only the city remained, sans the infestation.
I finish my wine. It’s from the bottle my date (Richard? Robert?) brought. I’ll have to go out and get another one soon, but that’s no problem. Stores, cars, streets, homes are all abandoned out there. No sense in hiding, no shelter anyway. What the tigers want, the tigers take. City-wide Armageddon, that hardly seems to have changed anything. Ask the few people left, the grizzled homeless man wandering Camden street, the little girl in the parakeet shop.
“Ask the crazy poet lady near the empty college,” I giggle. “We’ve always been alone.”
From The Warren Weekly
ALIENS SPEAK: “WE’RE TAKING ALL YOUR CITIES...AND WE WANT JIMMY HOFFA BACK!!
Even though Jimmy Hoffa disappeared over thirty years ago, the citizens of Detroit have not forgotten. And neither, says Alice Walden, of Centerline, have the aliens.
The cats are in the apartment with me before I know it, like a type AB positive shadow, disdainfully brushing their velveteen coats on my naked legs as they pass, searching for prey. Well-bottom eyes slide over me, unseeing, empty, and I know what they hunger for. I don’t have any. That’s why I’m safe, why I’m not afraid. None of the cavernous black mouths seem as bad to me as waking up to the same person each morning, none as dark as another day of student teaching.
They drift out as quietly as they came.
silently gone feeding on
hope, but there’s no one left. They go hungry because
there’s only
me
But when they feed they also consume petty greed, vacuous pretend sympathy, doctors, lawyers, city officials, disappointment. They are clean, surgical, and I feel that they are all that the city, the people, the world, deserve. All that I deserve, no more than I expect.
I crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it into the sink with the cigarette butts. I pulled out another sheet, reflecting happily that there was no mail anymore, and no Poetry journal editors getting rejection slips ready for me this morning, at least not in Detroit.
I started again. It was going to be a long night, and poetry can be a bitch.
they creep...