“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
The Incorporated Town
I.
It’s dark enough for darts to shine
through the tarp, tattered over
logs. The highway hums and a train
blows its whistle below the lumberyard.
End of the line: Landisville, a nowhere
whistle-stop with stalagmite gas
pumps failing to print receipts,
since a big company bought its name.
The steel roof stole the moon,
like the cat and the fiddle, a falling star,
in the sky between barn and house—
and the runaway dish dined with the spoon
in the lumberyard stacks, where lovers fiddled
with zippers and snaps—stiff denim
sleeves and legs losing their crisp,
dryer crease, crossing limbs.
II.
The train cars are trying to sleep
in the postal town. Purple tracks
forsake concrete footer and loading
dock pad. The pale moon
asks homes to hold the bones.
The old stadium strayed into
grass parking and green courts.
The farm home, framed before
the town, got torn down.
Its pines bled pitch and needle
by the baseball diamond. Barbed-wire
twined the tower twitching ghostly
mouths, gaping meat-traps.
III.
It was enough to grow ears like corn.
(In kindergarten, we played on concrete cheese.)
The gravel smoked and growled like the black
dog behind the basketball net.
An egg, from the fridge, fried on the sidewalk.
Midday soaps made the shag
carpet soft as sneaking rabbits—
pelts, clothes-pinned, drying
in the basement with dusty Ball jars.
Cold War Clocks
The December night with no snow
swallowed streetlights. The Salunga clock
said: Minneapolis, Minn., O.B.
McClintock Co. The clock next to
the bank in my town, the twin to Salunga,
also honored “All Who Served”—
the veterans of World War Two.
(But ours was stuck at six thirty.)
Their clock chimed. The church on our hill
hymned bells for hours. Amtrak
horned behind our house and the gravel
alley at night, allowing us kids
in bed to think the thermonuclear
world had to tell our white house
it was moving by, as the Mennonites prayed.
(Our rosary string was like the sixty dots:
the plastic beads playing salvation,
with field and creek crossing low
lanes that flood flowering spring.)
Then the sirens of Three Mile
Island told us the truth of our street.
Matthew Hummer is a writer and teacher in Pennsylvania. He has published poems and prose in various journals, including Cosmic Daffodil and Novus Literary and Arts Journal.
