Galvanized

The diamonds of wire are silver and cold,

clutching the air of the vacant lot.

It’s a web for the city, a story that’s told

in the space between what we have and have not.

I hooked my fingers through one of the loops,

feeling the tremor of a truck on the main.

It’s a vibration that rattles and stoops

through the steel and the bone like a dull kind of pain.

At the top, where the metal is twisted and torn,

a rusted-out barb catches hold of the sky.

A jagged and man-made and stationary thorn

that waits for a reason to ask itself why.