TRANSUBSTABTUATION

by Molly McCully Brown

It’s the middle of the night. I’m just a little loose on beer, and blues,

and battered air, and all the ways this nowhere looks like home:

the fields and boarded houses dead with summer, the filling station rowdy with the rumor of another place.

Cattle pace the distance between road and and gloaming, inexplicably awake. And then, the bathtubs littered in the pasture,

for sale or salvage, or some secret labor stranger than I know. How does it work,

again, the alchemy that shapes them briefly into boats, and then the bones

of great felled beasts, and once more into keening copper bells, before

I even blink? Half a mile out, the city builds back up along the margin.

Country songs cut in and out of static on the radio. Lord, most of what I love

mistakes itself for nothing.