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PUBLISHED IN HYPHEN LITERARY & ARTS MAGAZINE​

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Down the road is a burnt-out house,
Its old silo, a flagpole to the sky
Streaming forward, forward,
The house craning back.

Light filters through beams and dust,
Onto a spoon of tarnished iron,
People practical, even in better years
When the chimney spat black.

Timbers grayed, blackened roof
Collapsing in slow, torpid decay,
Asking favors from entropy,
Aching in the fibers of its wood,

Pleading in unison
Particles waltzing in a lazy fashion,
Steps slow to conclude the dance with an end

Yet the roof lies submissive to the heavens,
The sky breaks, it’s the one two three, again.
Across the street—it’s paved now—

Is a new-construction house
Made of things better than wood:
Plastics and polyurethanes,
With a grass yard, and a swing-set

Where the children rarely play.
A minivan and a television that echoes
Images though the windowpanes
Across the flatland on clear nights.

A lazy stream of gray drifts from the chimney,
Blades of grass hum when the wind blows
Yet, their dog perks his ears to a high tone
Of plastics and polyurethanes, chanting:

We are the new generation.
We are the new generation.
We are the new generation.

It echoes across the road and dissipates into
Fields surging with green and stalks taller than your father’s head,
Circles through fields of corn and soy and soil, to find,

A black-toothed smile silhouetted against the sky
Consuming the harvests, fears, and sunrises,
Wind whistling across its timbers of its teeth,
Like the hiss of an old woman laughing

Further down the road is a graveyard.