Joshua Mehigan

The cement plant was like a huge still
nailed in gray corrugated panels
and left out forty-five years ago
in the null center of a meadow
...

Their ruler is elected state by state,
and no one cuts his heart out as he drowses.
Their senior citizens still copulate.
Their convicts are allowed to change their blouses.
...

They're over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
...

This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
...

It was her first time coming home from college.
She headed downtown for a drink or two.
Her girlfriend went home early. That was Christmas.
Now, under sapling pine trees in the clearing,
...

The fair rolled into town surprisingly
intact, like a plate unbreakable because
it has been dropped and glued so many times
that it is all glue and no plate. The fair
...

Aluminum tank
indifferent in its place

behind a glass door
in the passageway,
...

Nothing has changed. They have a welcome sign,
a hill with cows and a white house on top,
a mall and grocery store where people shop,
a diner where some people go to dine.
...

On the crowded hill bordering the mill,
across the shallow stream, nearer than they seem,
they wait and will be waiting.
...

I get there early and I find a chair.
I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod.
I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod
and second an opinion I don't share.
...

None of us understands our story better
than this nonentity, unconscious slip
of nature, nonetheless our common parent
dilating at the bottom of the sea.
...

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
...

They stepped down into cool continual wind
that smelled like wet rocks but caressed their faces.
The pit was dark. But even when the eye
adjusted there was nothing there to see.
...