White paper coffee cups collect in drifts
by the freeway exit ramp—the hearts of ghosts
once held tight then tossed out the window
of a car speeding across the desert at four a.m.
trying to stay awake to see, when the light
came back, what the battered face of the land
could tell us about ourselves: how the mountains
were stark and risen; how we were sunk dumb
in between, a scathing plain of wind turbines
resonating unearthly as Amelia Earhart’s flooded engines
chugging their final gasp on the ocean floor;
how the sea was here once and swallowed heights,
long since yawned and pulled away paving
this desert with a tired yellow dirt now blown
through our teeth, through our beating pistons,
and a few black rounded stones as souvenirs
from lost time; how thistle-studded towns
were hardly refuge; how the many stones
we had gathered were bright and jagged,
too young by design to tell any real story;
how lust and lost became an exchange in glances
through a motel’s cracked facade; how these roads
kept on dressing down like lightning on a postcard
running fingers in the hot mouth of experience.
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