boilerplate

Smoking cigarettes in my one clean undershirt. This summer feels like a sermon on pride and speed and neon. We’re indistinct as stars or skateboarders blurry under streetlights. There’s a savant that can mimic creation, from birds in a sack to bullets the size of a boy’s hand. Truckers have jokes about the Department of Transportation we’ll never understand. Our ideals of authenticity and progress stalemate over the sushi place turned Waffle House. Some say it’s all about culture with a lowercase c, while others insist it’s what I do when no one’s looking that matters (e.g., bondage lit, lots of Sheryl Crow). The truck stop up ahead glitters like a mirage. We may never be in the same time zone long enough to compromise our feelings of this place. Its moments of familiarity as fleeting as an oldies station from a passing car, before it becomes another thing altogether. Girls’ night resurfaces, but only as some antinomian treat. The murals conceal their hobo aesthetics beneath layers of persimmon and mauve. It’s not enough to say we valued risk, that we were beautiful as hunters— the ones who said tombstones arch like lovers in a field, their spines thrust in the air, their backs black with crows.