Blue trailer-houses lined careful as garden
artichokes. Exercise daily: Walk with the Lord.
A rusted wagon wheel propped against the rotted porch rail,
Christmas-light lined. The truck-stop sign's hand-painted
on scrap ply. I measure the script—it's thin as a nail slip. Behind
my eye I see the station owner's wife, squatting tippy-toed
in flip-flops, sucking her lower lip, flipping her Guide to Basic Calligraphy.
An upended, pink-streamered tricycle, wheels still spinning in blue.
Wake up America! The tight band of skin between the pregnant
woman's hem and the toothy elastic of her stirrup pants casts an underlying
bruise of blue. Judgment is near. Jesus is coming. On the truckbed
before us a rope unravels and releases row after row of steel rebar down
into the waist-high grasses as we watch and follow. Our God
is an Awesome God. We figure we should call someone
but there's been no service since Seminole's last historic brick. We don't
know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future.