Middle West

I jumped up and hit my head on the bottom of the road. I landed in your clothes. Crumbs of dirt and roots ruined your jacket. I climbed down into your car and began the southward thaw to your hometown. Fog along the river hardened the air into plaster and I put my head in the cast. I popped in a cassette for the sinners on their walks, hemming the highway with the air in their steps, we die to become the absence of traffic. A cell phone under the backseat glowed the way. I got out under the shoulder of your state, where glaciers never scratched. Barrels rotted around an overturned tractor on the border. of a corn field. I gathered my ghosts and hung them like coats on the barbed wire. Rain watered the dirt in my hair and mixed me a new intuition. I started to grow a root.