Factory Town After Ice Out
by Christine Jackson
A vacant warehouse stares with empty eyes.
A parking lot sits guarded by a chain.
Along the truthful asphalt doves moan lies
and peck a muddy swirl around a drain.
Night falls hard across this rusty field.
Sirens shriek, a silenced shotgun pumps
inside an attic room. Drugs concealed,
he dances on the trestle bridge and jumps.
When morning comes, the granite river runs
beside the piles of bricks and sagging docks.
It rushes past a shed where he hid guns
and whorls around his body caught on rocks.
While sleepers in the tenements still dream,
a plow’s hard iron scrapes the pavement clean.
Christine Jackson grew up in New England as a swamp Yankee. She now lives at the edge of the Everglades and teaches literature and creative writing at a South Florida University. At least, she is supposed to teach. She probably learns more from her students than they do from her. Chris’s poetry continues to live in the archives of several online publications, including The Slag Review, Peacock Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Terror House Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review.
