Queens on the Highway

By Josh Carmel

They say…

They say it’s coming soon.

The sundry sounds of silence,

Moving outward against

The tumult of noon.

Estival heat, piercing the deadbeat

Livery of morning smoke on Main Street.

Where the Baker’s boy would gather rubbish for the store.

Clumsy hands, clambering over the reliquaries of insignificant sentimentality,

The spools and spindles play more like a cardboard symphony,

Rather than a boisterous paean. It’s unruly, dissonant clamor

Caught in the waxing bare-bred trees

And ill,

Old dying cough of church bells in the Southwest corner.

Struck out North, running parallel to the shallow trough of Abbotsville Cemetery.

The din of the dead, half-framed in sunlit shafts,

Ghostly gossamers asunder in sunken, sallow eyes

Shivering, quietly, in their sockets.

Draped in starched clothes

And the whole.

Carved in clear cut alabaster.

Out farther, past the General Store.

Where Johnny, a Marlboro Red firmly between his teeth

And tobacco splotches radiating against flannel decadence, would call:

“They are burying queens out on this here highway.

Just like they used to do in the olden days.”

And sure enough, he would be right.

The bawling embers of Western elegies

Would clash against Goliath’s sword

And sure enough, there they would be.

Mounds of dirt stacked softly against

The tethered afterglow of lilacs

In moonlit May.

A chink of meadowed light

On the crest of antiquated night.

And shortly after, straining

Through the haze of polluted

Prayer, spring would come to this old town.

As it always did when Johnny called,

“They are burying.

Burying queens on this here highway.”

Just like they used to do in the olden days.