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Melting Roads

Jason Anderson

Prospect Street, rimed narrow;
the polar bear shapes, the effigy
mounds; the buried hydrants, the Hondas

and Saabs; the Bradlee’s parking lot, 1989;
the diamond-clean clinical glow, the whitened piss-yellow fluorescence; the clouded halos,
the pyramid drifts; the scabbed-over soup skins of ice

The ash collects, it tapers uncircumcised—the checkout woman’s Winston; she’s caustic and quotidian:
the Japs, the weather, all small hands and cerulean blouse

The excavated Celicas and out-of-state J-Terms crunch their ruts; the day warms, half rains, cools; uptown papier-mâchés chunks
of slush and spume, flinted black;

The restaurant men lay heavy carpet; the awnings sag strangely
like dogs in hammocks; the orange state plows carve clean
Nazca Lines—the caprice of lissome bicycle tread, etched into melting roads