by George Bishop
The old Coke plant’s coming down, the one
that never made it as Mike’s Dry Cleaning
and became the haunted building on Main,
tinted windows telling more stories than…
Sunday. Two Caterpillars are lined up off
to the side that’s not a side anymore, chalked
with resistance. Not far away a Holiday Inn’s
half gone, the lobby looking like Roman ruins,
the sky checking in, checking out. I wish I was
so quick to clear wreckage, to plumb and square,
put something up in its place, a strip mall or bank,
something that never loses its feel of emptiness.
My plans change daily depending on my plans.
Most days I feel lucky my heart’s only had a few
things torn apart, I feel content owning patches
of weeds and wildflowers where love crafted
intricate ends, insisted on additions and finally
left things for new owners. Then, I see surveyors
with elaborate scopes mounted on tripods, men
in heavy boots arriving ready to go underground,
landscapers trading sketches—it’s tempting
to smell the shavings of sharp pencils again,
to conjure a draftsman doubling as a demolition
crew copying your measurements. But, today
I’m enjoying a turtle green bottle of ice cold Coke,
leaning into a morning perfectly designed for
destruction—somewhere inside the earth shakes,
implosions of sadness and joy are pulling me in
and dust defines the air like unnamed angels
taking turns blessing the vacancy of open graves.
