Start by leaning against your car until
you glow like a broken cowboy song
and unlearn your father’s hands.
Listen as the radio tells you how to leave:
a dog who walks across a state to sleep on
a different farmer’s porch. Shift into first,
let cattails remind you of the silencer on a gun,
silos to quit drawing crows on the sleeves
of your varsity jacket. Push to second & watch
the night become the same before you were born:
stars tipped like sawgrass, a town of daughters
dreaming of tying sharecroppers to bedposts
& burning fallow over their necks. By third,
let part of you become pool hall & the other
scarecrow: a butcher-paper moon glows,
a pack of cigarettes grows damp on the porch.
Pass a 7-Eleven & the ghost of boys looking for animals
to cut their names into. Hang down your arm
like a crop duster & listen to the foxes cry
about growing teeth in the middle of the night.
Watch a woman strike a match like she’s walking
from a burning barn as you ease into fourth.
Now, remember the girl who washed her hair
in bathtub gin & made you lick the ends dry.
The entire road will begin to smell like thunder.