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?