Passing Through Nelma, WI

Small towns pass into
the rearview mirror 
from Anvil Lake to Iron River.

Shuttered hardware stores 
and two-pump gas stations
recede into pine-thick forests. 

Telephone poles come staggering
along the road, crossbars 
broken, no pole straight.

At the last bend before 
Michigan a weedy
field surrounds a silo,

sagging and roofless. 
Suddenly an intersection
of gray abandonment:

shadows of buildings, rusted
pickups, a trailer home with broken
windows of somebody’s life. 

Solitary at the end of a vanishing 
perspective, the failing neon 
of the Triangle Tavern blinks
 
“open” in the old language. 

​Published in Third Wednesday, Vol XIII, No 2, Spring 2020