The first night, the trees stood apart from one another
like men in a church who have learned silence as inheritance.
Here, even the air conditioner hymns like psalms,
cold breath stitches into the drywall of every room.
I walk beneath billboards fat with smiling teeth
each mouth bright as a wound refusing to clot.
The rivers drag their brown skirts through the state,
slow as old women carrying grief to market.
In the grocery store, peaches sweat under light;
their sweetness feels rehearsed, almost governmental.
A white woman says baby to strangers in the checkout line,
and I flinch the way dogs do before thunder arrives.
Night falls early here. Crickets needle the dark
until the whole county sounds embroidered with ghosts.
At the gas station, a boy lifts ice into a silver truck
his arms glisten like somebody has baptized him in oil.
Sunday enters the city wearing its good shoes.
Even the abandoned houses seem to kneel a little straighter.
I have begun to understand loneliness differently:
not as emptiness, but as a field enormous enough to echo God.
