In the window reflection
Of the passenger mirror
Bordering fields merge
In a casual guitar duet
Of distant neon plumage
Like a parrot atop its cage
A creature you
Can’t touch because
Realism is
Just breathless telling
Because infinity is the most believable thing
In the dip rise stem of road stem wires
Where a parish church spire
Pricks the gauzy plumes of superdiesel gods
Roll up the window of man
Roll on
Turn on the heat
Drawn from the night
Tune the radio
In search of tune
Find yourself
In a new circumference
Sunday bells
Of hearsay battlespace
Foreign tongues reporting bone facts
Amid nerve-centres of disaffection
Look outside at
Nature’s entrails
The equine form
Is Platonic
Coarse signature
Of horseshit
Look around
The turning world
In its slow
Cyclical plot
Behind
Hecate’s wheel
Roll up the window
So the outside moans
Like a spaceship
In a wormhole
So the tires
Turn into wings
There’s a hockey team
About it
Icarus in Motor City
Crumbling public art
Divers urban farms
A Robocop statue
Fragments—figments—mental residue
Overlaying a field filled with a hundred deer
Feeding on unreaped corn
White scuts like eyeless faces
Muzzles
In the snow
Ears
Pricked
All of this stored
And hidden as the hidden moon as
Scrambled voices shuck off their aether,
Are legible, fall silent, a song:
One of Chopin’s Nocturnes
At midnight, reception choppy
Through torchlit crossroads with
Tampered-with signage
Through shimmery air
In oncoming headlights
Through pentatonic eyes
Of Teutonic winter
Through wet grisly
Outdoor passageways
Through grim
Septic butchery
Where the light
Don’t shine
And where it don’t shine
You don’t see
Thousands of deer
Are run down each year
Cut through another
Arcing line
— Dustin Cole is the author of the novel Notice (Nightwood Editions) and the poetry chapbook Dream Peripheries (General Delivery). He has also contributed writing to APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Maximus Magazine, Safety Propaganda, BC BookWorld, Heavy Feather Review and the British Columbia Review.