America, Sleeping
By S.J. Brooks

It’s out there somewhere, reflecting off the black-topped street, dancing off the yellowed Rhine, chugging outside Kingman, Arizona, through the darkness with only the tire squeal and busted headlights.  It’s frozen in the moments of your past, like icy droplets through the foggy valley, trapped in a snow-capped mountain overlook, a bent picture in a bent picture frame, through bridge boards built over small racing streams, to the towers going up to hell, where we all end up, turns out.  You saw it off your front porch shaking in the tree limbs across the street over a plantation house back when you were younger, now you’re older, every second, tick-tock.  What’s up, Doc?  It hovered over the window in a fog the Saturday nights you sat in the backroom of your trailer with your fingers moving, your heart pumping blackness and joy out into the nothing night.  It reflected off the indentations in your old front door, in tiny cracks full of streetlight and empty, sometimes you sat smoking it, other times you slept through the morning night heat and ice; your fingers rubbed against the metal lock and left some trace of everything you were, covered over in the morning with droplets of sunrise.  You touched it when you locked the door the last time, turning the key in a lock that wasn’t yours, no more, goodbye, thirty-three hours on the Desert Express.  Everything you own behind you in the cab, boxes jarred by the highway, you felt America sleeping one night, one night out of your whole life, it took your whole life, you roared through Dead Town, it was late enough for there to be no time, summer, black men stood smoking cigars, one diner was lit golden, the night was wet, the diesel boomed, you screamed and whooped, your hands on the wheel, hot ashes jumping out the windows, snapping at the hairs on your knuckles, your throat smoked.

It dances off the insides of your red-rimmed eyeballs, it stretches through like broken dream, it comes to you in nighttime, it burns you in sunlight, out in smoke you blow into lost pines, over wet hay bales, you can’t see it, there is no book-mark, the page is not ear-marked, it’s not your friend, it ain’t in red wax smiles, it’s not sitting on a dusty shelf or in your reflection. 

You will forget it—sometimes it will fade into the smell of your father’s garage—dirt and gasoline. 

Wake up.  Open up the door.  Walk into the night, wander out to the trees, listen, hear it rolling by.