Erase

The empty silo stood surveillance over the road dusty with cut wheat chaff and dead air. The turkey vultures flew surveillance over the silo. No breeze. No clouds suggesting relief. Only the distant horizon implied escape, shimmering in heat, a mirage of promises.

I drove down the road in my Ford truck, its side panels caked in loss, my engine pinging from the heat like a lover yearning for someone's touch. Along the road, shriveled cherry trees languished, their fruit black as rabbit pellets, fruit dreaming of a time when sweetness was as fulsome as lips poised to kiss.

And I drove on, the road plumb bob straight. No off ramps. No crossroads. No opportunity to deviate, destiny pulling me polestar north like legacy, my genetics of failure.

There it was, my grandpa's roadside café, consumed by kudzu, surrounded by unharvested fields lying fallow in disuse, the land taking back its possession.

From the second story, askew in rusted bolts, our family name hung like a victim on a gallows. On the front porch, a menu board memorialized a last meal in partial letters, an acrostic to a past generation's dream deferred:  H_m, 25¢,  Orag_ _uic_, 5¢, Pi_, 5¢, Eg_s, 15¢.

I u-turned in the café's weed-strewn parking lot, drove south, and watched my grandpa's place disappear in my rearview mirror like a diary page of desires erased.

Predators flying

Into the setting sun,

Ellipses of doubt.

Heart Disease

His heart was like a threadbare shirt
in a thrift store tattered and soiled
often unwanted shelved in dark corners
of his lover's disregard

Or was it him not her his heart marble
petrified wood impenetrable to care so
that affection directed bounced off
with a thud

Her heart was a well seeking water
a planting bed dry from drought so
that buds of desire shriveled into
cursive s's and f's dissatisfied

Or was it her not him her heart a
tentacle probing grasping strangling
suffocating weaponized to defend
and attack

Their hearts diseased ventricles
coiled to thrust not pulse to repel
not embrace together beating in toxic
constriction

Steve Gerson, English professor emeritus, writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his six chapbooks Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety, What Is Isn’t, and There Is a Season.