If you walk fast you did it.
—David Baker, “The Truth About Small Towns”
Three days left and some crumbs of
summer, meaning hours, meaning
ours. No one’s everybody. Each of us
has our little corner covered in divots
and chips, dents and splits. No one
holds a chunk of cement over their
head without not thinking it through
a little. The coffee never lies. We are
weak and burnt and bear the brunt
of us. We’re spats and traffic. Boil
orders, oiled borders. Heat in the short
streets, cameras on the corners.
He didn’t bludgeon the bronze boy in
his song, didn’t stone the uptown
Art Center’s statue deeper into silence,
the suspect who chucked a hunk
of concrete at its base. Local news
removed his photos from this story when
we learned that he’s a juvenile. But if you
try to erase your footprints you better
use in-season leaves. The copper kid’s
barefoot on a tree stump, “Forest
Maestro,” conducting with a crooked
stick this little city’s theme song: won’t
be long. Word gets around, security
cam screen shots get a lot of comments
hot with hate that help ID adolescents,
I guess, but look around. Old five-cent
soda ads fizz to flakes on sun-baked
alley walls. A dry rain falls in the caved-in
shoppe. A sachet of rain falls top
drawer down in the widower’s hutch.
At bottom we’re winter sweaters,
we’re summer break moth bait.
Everybody’s nervous, but wants it
more, the team of a dying town.
At the game we string up our sign
on the school track chain-link, Post-Prom
Gun Raffle, and cheer a little, then leave.
You’re only worth your last cast iron cure
in these kitchens. Around here it’s hard
to tell the late angular light from blight
in the trees. Maybe it’s antler abrasion
out there on the bark, maybe somehow
ice already. It’s hard to tell the light
a goddamn thing.
James D’Agostino is the author of Nude With Anything (New Issues Press), The Goldfinch Caution Tapes, winner of the 2022 Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser Press), and Build Your Castle Out of Sugar Cubes All Your Enemies Have Tongues, which won the 2025 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. He’s published chapbooks which won prizes from Diagram/New Michigan, CutBank Books, and Wells College Press. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Forklift Ohio, Conduit, Mississippi Review, TriQuarterly, Flyway, and elsewhere. He teaches at Truman State University, lives in Missouri and Iowa City, IA, with his partner, the poet and book artist Karen Carcia.
