/dreamscape/

when the endless night rises they come alive & its all in a haze. there are cars speeding down forty-one in swathes of fluorescent streetlights & stars so distant they barely even exist but still they’re gone. they say that somewhere someone’s mama is wondering where her baby boy is but it’s in another universe that she cares.

nobody knows where they go but everybody wishes they did. down main there’s a neon ice-cream shop with soft-serve that smells like curdled milk & waxed floors & grease. if it was all tangible they’d sit in those ripped crimson booths & rub their soles on the shiny tiles but nothing that they hold in their hands ever stays.

sometimes you can see them in the old church steeple clinging to the sky. the big city is a speck from thirteen-hundred feet but the suburbs are like the ocean: all blue & worn in the moon’s lust & stretching on for miles & miles. it’s on the broken roads that they dance; the paths of family supper clubs that smoke meat early sunday morning & buzz their electric signs in the night & the county trails that lie all matted & sticky & worn from layers & layers of rainboots.

when they were little they’d gather in the middle school parking lot & swing plastic bats at tennis balls & lick cherry popsicles. the bleachers were blocks of ice but they’d scale the steps in mittens & earmuffs & jump off the other side & scuff their knees. there are still spots of blood in the gravel but by now they’ve been buried under years of snow.

it seems that they’re all just trying to hold onto their memories but they’re slipping. they’re flying. & so in the night they run & so in the night the wonder & so in the night they all try to keep themselves from forgetting the way their streets smell, the way soft-serve tastes, the way it feels to fall in love & be some young & oblivious teenager. 

& sometimes if you close your eyes you can hear them, all alive & whole for a second.