Sad Ohio Stars

Sad Ohio stars smudged across the windshield,
frozen tracks caught in the snow.
Silence of purple winter nights
looked at through drowsy headlights
struggling to keep awake.

We turned into adults
in drunken nights lost on High St.
to the tune of the garbage flowers
sprung from guitar strings,
rising with the foam of PBR cans
in warm bars full of song.
The girls pointed cameras at each other and clicked
as smoke ascended from the ends of their forked fingers
and the bands sang for nights
when small glories were won
in each other's arms.
Bringing the bars to a close,
we trekked home across the grimy snow,
unfucked, lugging six packs
with arms empty of women.

One night, we watched from the bed
of my brother’s pick up as the fire of stars
leapt across the sky,
out of nowhere
back into nowhere,
too timid even to wish on them.
I was trying to figure out
what the Greeks were up to,
conjuring brawny Gods from
three puny dots connected by a line
drawn with a finger in a child’s eyes.

The stars meant nothing to me,
all of them.
I did not know who they were.
We were lost to each other’s stares
a hundred roads ago.

In Central Ohio it’s the garbage that’s beautiful.
The empty cardboard beer cases
turning into crowns, the hardwood floors
stuck to your shoes on Sunday morning.
Shit makes the flowers grow
from this landscape of boredom,
where the cows stand in one place all their lives,
and the corn waits obediently between strip malls
and wonderful green mountains beyond the gray sunset
rubbed out like a mistake with a Staedtler eraser.

The casket skies of old Ohio,
one year from me,
moving, changing, shifting,
falling harder into the gray.

My family came over the hills of Chillicothe,
out of the huge mists of Nogytuck and Pity-me,
the gunsmoke of Israel Putnam and a crooked fork
thrown to the bottom of the Scioto River.
We had reasons to be lonely.
We had reasons to leave home.
We had nothing and no one
but each other,
the same people we'd always had.

Traveling,
I will always be digging
at my heart in Ohio's
frozen dirt.

Go have a youth, I remind myself,
but I never really knew how
to be young and
the saddest city is the one
you grow up in,
the one
you never get out of.