Back to Carthage
       

Pay that slight money, our feet on the bus
ride into fields without houses
shining in freezing rain.

The shoulders of houses are shadows.
It was what we could afford,
until the snow caught skyhaunted
earth. And we will turn
back, our shoulders shaped of shadow, and bone,

back to Carthage,
slip back inside and find another way
in the shelter of ruins,
latterly studying in derelict shops

their castoff merchandise, columnar divagation,
the hidden places where shadow becomes form, as when
in juvenile corrections, I looked forward most of all

to Friday night pizza,
permitted in a small and dirty room, for our virtue.

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Copyright © 2019 Claire Millikin All rights reserved
from State Fair Animals
Unicorn Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission