honey locust

pods twist in the spaces between the thorns

I’m that yokel

staring as vacantly as I can at your one-way glass

I wouldn’t have hesitated to step on the real thing

between this ridge and the next still brown, still blue

the Norfolk-Southern logo and a graffiti tag

beside the campus elms bobbing drunkenly

the quarry trucks sit spotless beside the aggregate

some small dead thing with its attendant crow

meltwater shimmers atop the ice

on the flat black roof haloed in dew

just half a mile away already looks blue