Someone is living in the rusted
pickup parked on Burr Cliff.

A woman washes underwear
in the gas station sink, mouths

son of a bitch past her reflection
in pockmarked stall doors.

It’s beautiful, the way we hush
when blood presses through

seams, around our jewelry, hair.
In the asphalt lot out back, trees

seep into the sky like blue ink
on polyester. More of a bloom

than a rush. They don’t say
that a weed’s roots are the exact

mirror of its majestic branches.
When the truck stop follows you

onto the curb with a hard stare,
run. In another town, doused

with patchouli, the woman might
have a guitar and fringed jacket,

the back door of a fraternity late
past last call. She whips her hair

back, kicks gravel to the road.
The air is so thick it’s like tongues.

After their shift at the jalapeño popper factory,
two men pounded Schlitz at the dog track,
careened a Ford pickup off the cliff at Ludlow

before red sun started choking the road.
Tyson inherited his father’s leather belt, the one
that used to sway from a nail in the kitchen

on the days Pop brought home frozen pepper
stumps, daubs of spare cheese in bags.
Lila stretched the length of the sofa, flipped on

Steely Dan and a vanity mirror with pink
fluorescent panels. Where did they think they
were going in that crippled Ford? Tyson’s

father thrown to a mean elm, gasoline soaking
hornet nests and thistledown. Why not
another woman in the next town over, left

glancing at her watch and finishing
the gin all by herself, under a yellow afghan.
Tyson wanted to burn that tree down

though he had never seen it, his face in Lila’s
apron when the cherry-picker sped past.
As a young man with his Shop-Vac in hand,

he will enter the empty walk-in freezer,
a steel mausoleum, dropping to his knees to chip
three inches of ice from the concrete floor.