Second PCS

by Brandon Hubbard

And the money runs out
so you couldn’t get home

Time went by
a year went by

To the winter again
where you load the
trunk in arid heat

And drove all night into the
Smoky Mountain gas-station towns

Turns slow-going to a higher place
where the trees are sketches in
graphite from a passenger window

And the road gets blacker
leading north

There is another kind
of crying than from the eyes

The sobbing we travelers
find behind our nose
and chests and throats

when we realize at the end
how far we have gone away
in calendars and waking dreams

Here the sky cuts open into the
other place, here the foot goes hard
burning this goddamn night
where the blue begins tomorrow.