What the Flat Sky Kept

Marcus sent a photo. No message,

just the demolished grain elevator

and two words: gone now.

I hadn't thought about that town in six years.

The elevator is a concrete slab

with weeds already splitting the edges—

you can see them in the photo, thick

and green against the grey—and behind it

the sky doing what that sky always did,

which was nothing, which was going on

past the edge of every road you took to leave.

I couldn't tell you why Marcus sent it to me.

We didn't like each other.

But now I'm thinking about that summer smell—

hot iron and something rotting sweet—

and how we used to ride our bikes

out to the lot just to have somewhere

to be going. The sky the same above us then.

The sky the same in the photo.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

The elevator gone and the sky

exactly the same.