by Jesse DeLong
Driving along the mountain’s edge, I see, up ahead, the city, its lights like the grid of a control
panel navigating a pilot home, & I remember when the bypass didn’t exist & I used to be in the
heart of it always
Said of we,
after splitting, what
burns bright must be so,
what is of the earth is always
to approach an end, &
being too much
of the mud
we could not know
much about gods, or love, but
I think
the interstate is
a big, grey god
we rode, one which
unloads at the edges of
the city
chicken shit, light bulbs,
gloves with which
we purge the flecks
of last night’s spit-up
meatballs, & if,
on some night when
I close up
the windows so
that I can say at least
at least, at least,
the cigarette smoke
will stay with me,
I beg to feel, no,
to fall down
a hill &, up ahead
where I can almost
reach, the city lights
are not an angel shattered
onto earth, the earth is
not a sky, but only
wants to get there, or
be pushed around
by gravity—Whether or not
the ones I
loved are what
I’d hoped for & who
they’d claimed to be.
Jesse DeLong works as Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. His poetry book, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, was published by Baobab Press. Other work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings, and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press.