It is dark in South Carolina
on the way back. There is a cross
spearing the landscape, holy
spire. Another in brown, in black,
in white, red neon gloss sailing
higher, bright between billboards
and roadside shacks.
The highway teems with questions
my mother never asks—
dark fishes tossed to whitecaps.
I haul them up, hung on ghostly wire,
mouths gaping wide. I hunger
for a taste, but fast
conspire to throw each star-pale
belly back. Drowned on air, silken
scales shimmer where they twist and
flap, I cannot bear the struggle, so I cut
the taut line slack. Silver specters
flicker, lost beneath the snaking river
asphalt, dappled black,
swallowed by the rolling hills with
each fresh mile that we pass. I see
a shadowed bow, a distant arc
approaching fast, proud mast aspiring
to salvation. No, not a mast—a looming
cross cleaves through the ebbing gray
exhaust, in South Carolina,
the dark way back.