day TWO HUNDRED and NINETY ONE

Find Us and Get Lost

I

there’s no grace to be found in Allentown

with its Baltimore fear and Gettysburg talk

the coffee shop crowd is too young to be hopeless

but they are hopeless, still, in and out the door

waiting for their words to be grown up on their tongues

it’s not too late to celebrate what’s regional, what’s local

be it food or dialect or anything that reminds

that we are not homogenized into the same place, people

something like a cheesesteak shop lost in a home depot

something like a five and ten window filled with built model airplanes

something like a model of the New York skyline in plywood and cardboard

something like the Mexican grocery and the young girls

running streets wild with balloons attached to their wrists

I’m almost sure the first breeze of fall is lurking

when it comes it may take all this away

II

communion of a half cookie on Hamilton outside Yocco’s West

the special sauce not sure if it wants to sit as I skate backroads

trying to guess the name of a tavern in a cornfield

spied from sixty miles an hour

spied from atop the Eastern Pennsylvania stars sitting full on stalks

greeted by a bar with that you’re a stranger look

Free Bird on the juke, happy birthday balloons stuck static to ceiling

these people are all related, blood or marriage

they make faces at ancestry, the bartender fishes

bottle service from a cooler with pray written neatly in black sharpie

Rolling Rock steeds rear up in cigarette and bear claw vapor smoke

a chorus of Welcome to the Jungle has broken out

pretty girl daughter of birthday mom dances

Axl Rose on beau, leaned over a pool cue

over the bar a sign says tipping is not a city in China

gooseneck Stella pours, the chorus is onto Bon Jovi

then to Clapton, then sappy 90’s country, they’re slow dancing

in the next room with promo shots of 80’s bluesmen

I hear the wheeze of the men’s room fan

the Busch beer ad circa 85 on the wall, a half

eaten cake, they ate the name, another sign on the fireplace

do not help with the fireplace

back on a barstool, a shot arrived

one girl says to the bartender Hey Nikki. Hey Ashley

she returns as she pours dead soldiers in perfect symmetry

this shot a flawless ocean to the top of the glass

I hoist it, expectations come easy

under my breath I cheers: here’s to death culture

--Jason Baldinger