of suburbia in flux behind one of the town’s, count ’em, two mega high schools. The sometimes-tended-to nature preserve where green & green slide crisp between brisk handshakes, where a middle-aged Jimmy John’s driver suddenly halts his ’98 Corolla, goes noiseless. Where the sun isn’t exactly booming, but it’s Sunday morning & I’m in my feelings, so I clop off a few paces, nice & easy-like. I mouth hello to the loveable maintenance man. Hello, loveable maintenance man I nod. He fusses with his mustache, flicks it out in a full tilt wave. In the way of mise-en-scène, I feel compelled to say it’s 2014. I’m a black, American poet, newly thirty & middle class for the Midwest. So far it’s the summer of two brothers unarmed, erased, posterized. Two more & I live my best days outside like this, under threat of rain: me, my bad form & no one looking on with the evil anvil of a hoisted eyebrow. The deceptive flip of an A-line bob—hand readied to protect the old money maker. Accordingly, smoke: a slinky Asian teen makes his body into a nickel, wheels up the wide alley between me & the trail’s opposite edge. Our shades, night- slick, reflect one another—different frames from about the same shelf. I catch myself for an instant in his left lens & wonder was it the Rocky-look I’m rocking? Was it the bare bones, bone-white, hooded Egyptian cotton track suit drawn tight around my head like a swim cap? (It’s summer here.) Or the ox calves teetering a chest somewhere between barrel & breasted, depending on the wind, the Taylor Swift–red grin of my diabolical office nemesis, or the moon cycle, maybe anything? Fin— In the director’s cut I’m the one being fatally femme: I pretend to check my face in the rearview mirror, pull a plume from a pinner & squeeze the trigger on a can of lavender Febreze. I chase myself out the window smarting every time someone flinches at the sight of me. Metaphorically, I could only be the pitch dark asphalt simmering in this parking lot. The fog lifting off a black tar river, already gone. Though obviously, given the opportunity, nay the luck—I’d play delivery boy, even maintenance dude. Anything but walking dead man. & I’ll be damned if I didn’t just run all this way to tell you that. Fuck.