Terminal
by Michael Catherwood


grease paints the road
where soggy cocktail napkins
turn with the wooden spokes

forget disheveled clowns pitching pennies
and bridges rising from fog
forget how the house creaks into evening

behind a tidy field behind a junkyard
behind the hill where towering lights burn
from an empty stadium like a stranger’s smile

and across town bright shovels
are sharpened until they’re deadly and now
listen: church bells from two miles away--

blue light falling from evening windows
deep purple bruises like plums
along highway 61 and markers dim on the Pig Trail

and a dead man’s smoky leather jacket’s been
thrown in a ditch where RAZOR is spray-painted
on a grain car and all the lost bobbers

get caught in the rocks--We found
my father’s wedding ring
in the backyard ten years after he died






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