I know nothing but the spray
            of buckwheat, highway 
perfume which permeates tar
            oases we cross each day.
Our tired shoes trace contrails
            of an F-150 that has already
blitzed through eternal savannah. 

I know nothing but adobe homes
            and SNAP. Bricks
laid in a pattern I can’t quite discern,
            etched into mountains
like long-forgotten cuneiform,
           waiting for some denim-clad
explorer to bring its Rosetta Stone. 

Until then, we settle, ephemeral
            & unpronounceable, 
waiting upon this assembly
            of fissure and dust for a voice
evicted—its stolen breath now
            only a road apparition: 
Tilework Americana. 

A blink of neon lights the path 
            from Mississippi deltas 
to concrete jungles, from checkered
            walls of late-night diners
to the daytime glow of Sunday papers,
            headlines flickering into 
a lithographic coma as we turn
            to our pharmaceutical dreams.

I know nothing but this America.
            It is an etching into vinyl never
before played. It is a vanishing 
            gradient of all I think 
and everything that I know. 
           It is the morning sun scaling above
the eastern ocean, diffusing an owl’s
           hoots into the twilight haze. 

– Jeffrey G. Wang