How to Love a Broken Town

Michael Dunaway

First, forget the maps.
They’re made for somewhere else,
where the streets wind without tangling,
and the signs stay where they’re put.
But here, the roads curl up on themselves
like old hands, stiff and too proud to stretch.
No one remembers who built the streetlights
or when the pavement first cracked,
but we’ve learned to walk on it anyway,
the bruises we don’t talk about
a sign of how long we’ve been here.

Love the silence of empty porches,
how the wind stays in the same spot
but never says what it knows.
Let it fill your mouth with dust
and a kind of quiet you can’t put down,
because in this place, even the noise knows how to disappear.
The trees still wave, but they don’t mean it.
They’ve seen too many storms,
rooted too deep to bend anymore.
The rust on the old trucks in the yard
wasn’t there when the fathers parked them,
but it’s built its home now.

And when the moon hangs low over the power lines,
you’ll see what you thought you could save
disappearing in the rearview.
It’s funny how it always looks better
the farther you get from it.
But you know, even now, that this town never leaves you.
It lingers in the sound of distant trains
and the hum of lights that flicker just when you need them most.
You learn to let go of ghosts
before they let go of you,
but they never really go,
they just sit in the corner of every room you’ve ever lived in.