Mark of leaving, memory contusion discolored by time.  Experimental car door mutters yesterday’s weather.  The wide thumb of a Saturday afternoon eclipsed by eventide even when sobriquet sojourns unspool from undropped acorns.  Where will I go to tire myself, to sweat myself pounds lighter?  Borne of sunscreen under floppy hat, searching the breeze for mint.  I don’t want to unwire myself but every hair on my body is magnified.  That’s when the phlebotomist leveled with me and said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but most of the good writers don’t become famous until they’re dead.”  Among the dust and the dry fields, surrounded again by engines.  That was twenty years ago.  I am in the blue hollows, I am in the cold van.  Makeshift huts and lean-tos, living on the sidewalk.  There is only one road in and one road out, one road.  Moonlight wades into spent grass, and keeping books is wrong.

*This poem was originally published in Michigan by Dunes Review in 2024. They cut the last half of what appears above as the last line.