father's_day raze we'll know where we're going when we get there. just drive. there's a woman selling welcome mats at the side of the road. a man shakes ashes from the ember of a cigarette through the rolled-down window of his black truck. he's got yoda on the dashboard and a boa constrictor coiled around his left bicep. all the post-mounted mailboxes look like old electric typewriters. try to memorize the numbers and names. they're already gone. the sixth and fourteenth concessions are reborn as charlatans after losing everything below the chest. a tarnished child's slide is free to a good home. brown and white horses graze between the latched wooden walls of their paddock. beyond that, fields of wheat. solar panels and empty silos. a tipped-over washtub. windmills whirl somewhere far away, and the sun tattoos the top of your hand with words from the back glass. we stop at a small cemetery in essex. someone's mother sleeps in the ground beneath my feet. a miniature mausoleum wears a white cross for a crown. i scrape the side of my smallest finger against a brown door and coax it open. the inside of the cupboard is brimming with ladybugs. eighty-nine dead and one still living. flies and the shattered shells of nuts sit on an old tree stump. its crooked mouth lets me see all the way down to the dirt above whatever roots remain. i can make out the sepia swirl of sand or cinnamon, and a spear of something green that's doing its best to grow where so little light gets in. on the return trip, a utility pole stripped of its power leans against another that still carries current in its veins. this is how we hold each other up. 220619 what's it to you? who go blather from