Fluency of Days

The road continues across the horizon. Serrated
against the tree line that runs parallel to the railroad tracks.

Inside a box car between St Louis and Chicago,
a man burning off his fingerprints.

Clouds vandalize an unremarkable sky.
On the map the tracks look like stitches across a wound.

He tampers with the larynx of a messenger pigeon.
So that it only carries the tightly wand scrawl he has wrapped around its left foot. No call.
Synonym for song.

The river runs parallel to the highway, maintained by grievances. Whose markers tell us
the distance from home. Which is relative.

Down this road, a confluence of trees, where a farm once stood.
The only structure left is the barn, whose roof is slowly turning inward.

The foundation sits with the remains of the house
beginning to merge into the trees that are growing into and out of it.

A stove left on in a dream.

Mold is growing inside the box of calendars,
inside the state maintenance building.

Perforated weather, a tear in a screen
door left banging off the hinges by wind.

Unhemmed cloud comes too close to ground, to ruin.

A dead bird trapped inside a window of a closed store front.

Let’s agree to stop counting days
since the last accident.