One day in a Piggly Wiggly self-checkout perhaps we’ll discover
our lurid eyes on the front of Vogue. Maybe tomorrow
we can pretend it’s a cover shoot, tilt our straw hats toward the sailboats
drifting from the cove, tacking the turquoise surf,
a white toothed grin, the seaspray glistening over blanched dunes,
a gust of orange over the pinkening hills.

Take a gaze through a glass of viognier.
What do you imagine, chrome shimmering in sepia?

A tuxedo black 1964 Chevelle loping along the avenue,
past the college campus as it encroaches on city limits;
meanwhile a secretary walks by Woolworth’s in a stone blue peacoat,
and a biker idles a pearly Indian, wearing boots of tanned leather,
as disinterested in the new architecture as General Electric.

Act like it’s a Warner Brothers production. Draw the curtains, lower the blinds,
move without friction. From a mahogany curio retrieve a crystal glass,
decant two thumbs of scotch & close your eyes.

Cut in tight on a Southern coal engine grinding steel to a screech;
pan out from the trestle spanning the river.

Imagine two swallows darting from the crown of a paradise tree.

Flashback to the gravel pull-off at the end of Peaceful Valley Road,
wild red raspberries overtaking the entrance, a steel-belted Mohawk
abandoned in the rhododendron, an empty aluminum Budweiser,
a plastic Kodak canister topless on a beach of slate & mud,
deer bone, schist & slag, a Tupperware lid, rivercane, driftwood,
an Oral-B toothbrush in a ripped Ziploc.

Skip a flat stone from the riverbank to the other side.

Trace its constellation & spirit the Pamlico into assembly,
chivvying the placid sound in dugout canoes,
affluent in woven reed & ligament, subsistent though on the pabulum
of fish traps flooded with shad, herring, striped bass & the river,
diffuse as a dream, rippling through the fabrication.

Jason Jones lives in Roanoke, Virginia with his partner Jessica and three cats. He is the founder of The City Salt, an arts and society magazine with distribution across Virginia's great valleys and at thecitysalt.com. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University and was a contributor for nysmusic.com, themelomaniacs.com, and The Riverfront Times. His poems have been published in Artemis Journal, J Journal, Saw Palm, Syncopation Literary Journal, and Wraparound South among others.