Leaving Waupun

By GR Collins

The geese are returning too early
from the south.
They crowd around the horizon
in ragged groups, dark fingernails
tossed in a dark wind.
I want to tell them
their optimism is unfounded.
This is no time to breathe
this masked air, to believe in
the solid ground beneath us.
I am driving my highway alone
while rain spits on the windows
and low clouds roll across the flint hills.
A coal train rumbles westward.
How strange it is to lose hope
to stand empty like an old barn
stripped of its siding, wind spinning
through a broken cage of ribs.
How strange to feel blank, redacted,
like winter fields, with crusts of snow
still clumped in the furrows
helpless under a terrible sky
unable to resist the coming assaults
of the plow. The car wheels
turn over and over on the blacktop
with a sound like paper tearing
or the gnashing of teeth
and the geese are returning
too early from the south.

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GR Collins is from Milwaukee. He's held jobs as a brick mason, farmhand, middle school teacher, prep cook, and currently works in biotech. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Whitefish Review, Red Flag, Hive Avenue, Red Rock Review, Flint Hills, and others. He lives with his family in dairy country, where there's always great cheese.