Flyover Country
by Sarah Lee
An old hurt road crooks like a finger pointing far from itself, a spit-dry spinal cord to wheels and a priestess of the Styx to the opossums. The one-room chapels that thorn across the fields lift them in sermon as proof of God’s wrath. Billboards for lawyers in low-budget wigs. GOD IS REAL. HELL IS REAL. ARE YOU READY? Silos that loom like giant headstones. Houses exhale to ashes after a hundred years. Gas stations bruise their knuckles to rust, empty restaurants bleed out the last of their neon. The meteorologist: cloudy with a chance of lottery tickets, glistening like gold teeth. The radio tower that can’t stop blinking back its tears. Flies wretch in horror at the corpses we call our cities. The railroad severing our shadows, graveyarded in our cradles.