Two Poems by Tom Laichas

Chevron Supreme written ‘In Synergy’ with “Shifting Sands” by Caryn Gilbert

The property’s close to worthless—
encumbered title, no water rights,
a contested will—who knows. There’s
no money left for lawyers. So

the fuel pumps become indigenous
to scrubland, witness to brilliant
night skies which, being broken machines,
they don’t welcome. Abandoned

on their concrete plinth, a row
of miniature monoliths in a desert
known for interplanetary
visitations, they are insensate

to whatever they might mean
for we, their meaning-givers, who
see in them a scarecrow future,
one which leaves us tall and skeletal.

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On a Gravel Parking Lot in a Recently Abandoned Town written ‘In Synergy’ with “Afterlife” by Caryn Gilbert

Certain photographic techniques
dye a blue sky black so that the airless
sun seems to bathe abandoned walls
beneath apocalypse. Cinder block

and broken windows add to the effect,
build it up deformed under no heaven,
to say: this is something like an afterlife
never before inhabited, a desiccated

skeleton that never carried flesh.
You know exactly what I mean. You
have felt like this sometimes: broke-
born, night-wombed, cindered

though, to your shock, ensouled. I
know the place myself, the snap-
shots, I still have them, of that wreck
we fell in on and, together, rebuilt.

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