The winking of

taillights makes me pounce at the

break pedal and I’m not

particularly fond of the act of driving a 1997 Oldsmobile down

the Pennsylvania turnpike.

I do like to be a tourist of small towns though.

An art critic of faded tooth brush factory billboards

Maker of postcards for places

who never bothered to print their own.

I love to imagine what it would have been like

if every Tuesday night after softball practice

in the seventh grade my mom

and I would have stopped at Marky’s Subs with the

blinking checked sign out front or

Russo’s Pizzeria– crudely painted red white

and green.

We have the same places in Kutztown but they

have different names and their own stories

blended in each corroded brick.

I wonder if I would have still liked to take the cheese off pizza

or learned to playe the trumpet if I would have spawned in the veins

of a different town.

Maybe we paint ourselves into whatever

stone settlement comes to know us.

I’m nostalgic for sidewalks I’ve never walked on

and street lamps that have never made my shadow.

I want you to know my streets because they’re

part of my own skin now– my past–

my breath is somewhere in the gusts

between the iron gated alleys.

Fallen factory buildings feel like amputations.

Everyone knows a place that memorized

the feeling of their bare feet on asphalt

and every place is beautiful because

someone remembers something there.

It’s true– I could stop and see for myself.

I prefer the tour though– the zoom in

zoom out of the places where we light candles in the

windows.

I’m making my own postcards–

dropping out an open car window to

watch each square to turn to ash

in the simmer of the tail lights

in front of me.