Sixty Miles Per Hour

The signal failed somewhere past the yard

and we sat in the heat for a hollow hour.

The landscape out here is jagged and hard,

a collection of gravel and rusted-out power.

I looked past the glass at a yard full of mud

where a child’s plastic slide sat tilted and blue.

The rain had turned all the dirt into flood,

and the creek was beginning to swallow it too.

Hanging above from a black, sagging wire

was a single red sneaker, its laces in knots.

It looked like a bird or a small, frozen fire

marking the places the city forgot.