Factory Town

The factory stands on the train of your town’s wedding gown, dirtying it and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Embarrassed, the clouds rush to cover up the track marks of the stars. On your way home from the factory -run theater, it’s too dark to say hello to the pale-faced people plummeting past you and your son. Who knows what bright things they conceal in their black coats now that they’ve rationed the rations. Home before curfew, the iodine tablets fume in the bedtime glass of water your son requests. He sips it as if it were hot tea while you read to him yet again that ancient story you three loved. You stumble over the new language, but even it is becoming beautiful. You close the book, kiss his forehead, stand the flashlight upright by the fuming glass and stumble to your bed in the dark. Your son will wake in the night and turn on the flashlight so he can see the water that he will turn into urine that you will carry in an armful of sheets down to the river, that gray, dappled, broken thing running through the dying trees like an app -aloosa spooked by gunfire.