Ode to the Collapsed Barn Off the Interstate
MARY SIMMONS
Your rafters suffer wind as a hungry animal, a dark shade
of pewter. Yes, you’ve died a thousand deaths. Yes, you die
every time we stop to notice you. Your ivy grows unkempt
in your haunches, like it always has. This is no omen:
crows yanking grass through your gaps, a surge of hay
on the backs of mice. Once, you thought you would burn
at the end of a season, like the unloved straw. Yes, you ache
for a new color. Lightning yawns your bones, but you do not catch
like a match dropped in water, blowing bubbles of lost hope—
all air is something like this. You rattle on aphorisms,
you, a reddened mark in the field, you, the shoe sole
peeled from its shoe and left to bake in the sun,
you damned trachea of howlers, you bowl of cigarette butts
dried out over a century. Your paint kisses the wind
with freckled cynicism, flaking and flaking still as the first snow
snows every winter, and maybe this is surrender
or generational dishonesty. You’re sagging from the center,
lowering your belly to the earth, as though you could fall
deeper, as though satin waits for you, as though someone will come along
and haul you away, piece by piece, and someone will notice you’re gone.
MARY SIMMONS is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she also served as the managing editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, trampset, Moon City Review, Variant Lit, The Shore, and elsewhere. She lives with her brown tiger tabby Suki in her childhood home with woods in the backyard.
