like a room with an open window, we
were haunted:
neither exit nor entrance,
fully: so the ghosts crossed our thresholds:
they have all gone out, they have all gone in:
the little houses leaning into the field of grass, the water
tower levitating into the sky, the roadside drill
that digs in the grit:
shock of the human
machine
continuously beating but irregularly: so absence
fills with expectation, overfills: and the thing is
king:
Copyright © 2019 Gina Franco. This poem was originally published in Quarterly West. Used with permission of the author.