Photo by Christopher Raley

Last Ones Free

Police car lights are echoes of twilight.
We pass it with the rest of traffic
on our race through California’s badlands.

Solitary scrub oaks and cruciform phone poles
darken to be brighter as silhouette
over orange canvass of resplendent sky.

Against the east a train rattles through
sloping plain, breaks of trees, rising hills,
all glowing mirrors of self-possession.

Only the crossing guard prophecies darkness
with its red that shrivels descending poles
and calls metronomic to grinning taillights.

We were the first ones done, the last ones free,
you and I, from our white city with its
black boulevards that hold summer’s heat long into night.