Picture it.
America—A portrait.
Painted right down to the numbers on the old mailbox. Red brush taps over a matted, pale, blueish-white, rust its edges like the tilted hood of the broken down ford in the front yard.
A basketball goal tirelessly supervises the venous emergence of green blades and stems that gerrymander a forgotten court.
A broken window covered by sheet plastic lords hazily and lazily above the splintery surface of a childhood home.
Across the hall, light dances through a curtain in another room, but nothing can be made of the image beyond.
A tall oak towers above the home and lawn.
The setting sun sprawls its shade diagonally across the scene.
The neighbor’s dog pants in the shade of their front porch draping its tired paws over the edge of the last concrete step.
A sprinkler rolls streams of water through an overgrown and shaggy lawn. A patchy sidewalk cuts through the weeds connecting the bottom step to more sidewalks, a dirty road, and a bumbling, fumbling city as if tethering yet another forgotten American Dream to a cruel reality.
A Blue Ribbon adorns the ornate frame as if in admission of the reflection.
Well done, artist.
Well done.
A Poet’s Qualm 