photographs by John Clayton Lee

Dark Wet Sidewalks

and the boy who had a broken truck stared listlessly now at the telephone pole, as his eyes began to bead up, he felt all of the emptiness that he had always known as a little kid bulid up into this neon-lit street that was as empty as midnight black, and even though there were druggies and whores and methheads out raving in the shadows the street still remained somehow relentlessly empty; and as he glared over to a gleaming orange street light, looking out of his skull now he followed the silient hope that he could somehow leave himself all at once just by looking at the nothingness all around him: the empty parking lot with dark trash only il-luminated by a buzzing orange-gray, and how cold and remoreless all of it felt now by being put through the new holes in his eyes and ears from what he had just heard coming from Gloria on the payphone that was now broken, aluring the same hopeless inquiry of beautiful livitidy as the ceaseless taronja

for my sister gerogia, who will always be so close to me inside no matter how far away she may seem

There is this fleeting feeling from the small town i grew up in, knoxville, that lingers within the dark rainwater puddles, and when that gray ceaseless orange beams down from the sodium vapor rays, there is a feeling that grows that is as if all at once you were gone, this deeply beauti-ful and unfathomable radiance of milky dark ash color growing from within you, insisting on an exultation for the long wet road and the mobile home’s tin roofs’ sounds as lichen-sized hail beat louly on it; in all that is empty and gray about that long winter sky, the new scars on her face that had no pronunciation because the sky was now a relentless empty yellow; gauziness that casted no shadows on no one’s scars, not even the man who sleeps beside the graveyard in the oil-stained spot in front of the Shell.