In a rural fringe, a future or a past
*
A note on the architecture:
Everything mimicked the worst clichés.
Malevolent structures so boxed
with windows reduced to an acid lace
of melodramatic busted glass.
Inside we nested under yellow lights,
folded our sheets into aspirational linen.
We played at bunnies on a green background
filmed with a shaky camera hand,
hemorrhaging shadows.
*
Don’t get us started.
We didn’t ask to be raised like tedious summaries
among the weedlots outside these dull houses.
Neither did she, partially forcefed,
intentionally stumped, bundles
of bumbled endeavors and cardboard lunches.
*
We consume what we must, to make it up.
In this neighborhood, tact never stood a chance.
On that corner the shutters were never meant
to stay hung. A pile of blank stones filled in for a yard.
*
Neither did we possess dunes.
Flung and compacted discards
into the pillars of our counterfeit landscape,
topography pretty tedious to scale.
What else could we have done?
*
Famished often
we ranged as far as we could
banded together against others
who banded together.
Drift
was not a motion we knew much about,
landlocked, knowing squall
but never breeze, guzzled dry in the heat,
siphoned daily down to our paltry reserves.
Still the best way to describe it is
drift
until one catches on.
*
Her wits are sawmill-honed.
Though perhaps lacking sufficient perversion
to be entertaining to a populace
so jaded by a false claim to dearth.
Some buildings just don’t know when to come down.
*
Rare nights we had some respite from the Drought.
They came thick like moss to snuff our rock.
*
So what if she chose to leave
all that unattractive suffering
back in our hometown?
To refuse to admit
she’d ever heard of the place
or lived in that yellow house
or confess she blew it down
with the last sour breath
she dared draw there?