Three Miles, Uphill in Both Directions

the sun was a letter of the alphabet then

my stomach could pronounce it better than my mouth

on the walk to school through two centuries of wreckage

past a ghost village and the end of town eaten by the interstate

along train tracks we knew to get off of when they started to hum

up over the wooded hill in the center of town with its water tank and cemetery

past hidden rooms with walls of wild grapevines whispering truancy

down into the industrial classroom a prison of numbers

where zero seemed to hold all the keys