Gardnerville

How could you know where the simile

stops

there’s a twang in the dirt, metallic footstep

of the future.

I can never transcend the image of brush

along the irrigation ditch, how it clung

in senseless visible hope, thirsty and coated

with its own pollen. It was yellow then

as I am jackal-yellow now, hackles pointed to winter.

This town will scatter my bones

beneath a new overpass someday.

The blue gift you left on my stoop

is too heavy. The heart is a scavenger.

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