shitty secondhand denim hops barbed wire fences
and starts fires with malboro butts
it’s exactly what it sounds like:
a pair of all-star footprints
in the tall, brown grass
that grows wild and envious under the cell towers
that the rowdy half-drunks drive past
bumping Lone Star in the 2004 Camry
that they stole from beneath the hum
of their grandpa’s sleep apnea machine
while the local banshees scream to the howling winds
amid jade skies and crushed cans of pop
their potential runs off as pollution
in the veins of moms and pops who
pulled their achilles,
got rejected from that private university,
never got the chance to skip town.
i know what it’s like,
i heed the horror stories they tell.
skeleton trees and cornfields
brushing against your shoulders
they thrive here, but you cannot
you may well both die here all the same
“the midwest
is a wasteland of rotten wood and spray paint
and preteens with nowhere to go.”
but i want to be rough, ragged, nostalgic.
i want to drag harness that horror like a hunter to a buck.
every sunrise will welcome you
but held against a tree
with a rifle to the soft skin beneath your jaw,
you will rethink making a mountain
out of this snow-sodden molehill
i want to hate this small town,
and i will know everyone in it well enough to hate them too.
you will face the early-fall fog like a duchess of mist
but you will never, ever leave