Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine # 14

And Still it is empty on these city streets where taxis once lined up and down at traffic lights, horns blaring like alarm clocks, if only people had any place to go.

It is still empty in every small town in Iowa and Illinois where storefronts are shuttered now and maybe for good, these places where crops have been plowed under and the feed store has no one to gather inside in the early chill to drink coffee, dark and thick as motor oil collecting in the engine pans of tractors that haven’t been started in months.

And it is still early on my street, where houses sit so quiet until I hear later in the morning, a piano played by a young girl through the open window