Ascension

Evening sits on the landscape like a serious word as we approach Washington DC. So many acres of privilege lie beneath divided wings and on a highway cars chase yellow headlights. We’ve not come here to find history, yet since the body scanner’s bleep in Los Angeles the flight has delivered loss’s wide cartography—overrun tribal lands given to potatoes, wheat and corn. We don’t belong in the air and below the land’s a residue of palimpsests, none of which we read. On the edge of my seat
the remains of another flight’s spilt coffee posit a bitter idea of the past.