Upside Down Club Josh Crummer We live beneath two and a half miles of concrete skyway; gentle morning traffic whispers over every sunrise like a nature host, though in truth we deified machines and gasoline long before the Interstate arched above our rivers like a varicose vein. Only those whose fathers tilled virgin Chippewa marshland remember the raceway on Westervelt and Kochville, a thousand arriving on opening day: Davenport, Roberts, Chasnis, Johncock, and Fairchild, local celebrities lifting a young city’s eyes from bone-dry bleachers to a sloping brown oval. If a car flipped along the high banks, its driver joined the Upside Down Club: impotent steel turtles flinging clay from their rubber feet while children laughed and laughed. Stars watch from the nosebleeds as weathered men weave on-my-way-home alibis their wives pretend to believe, park their rusted pickups at an angle at the local well, buy another Blatz and talk tales somewhere between a sincere testimony and a fisherman’s tale— I went every Wednesday night for thirty-five cens. I was always amazed at the race car that sat on top of the cement arch at the entrance; could never figure out how it got up there—
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2020 Still Life
