words

the shadows are in their front yards
while white figures play volleyball
at the nice white church
just down yonder,
a few houses over
in the by-mile neighborhoods
of these strange highway folk,
the edges of their driveways
flanked with stayback orange reflectors
warning wayward drivers elsewhere,
an existence carved
from southern pine barrens,
people long forgotten and mostly invisible,
committing their odd outland rituals,
inside off the road houses of the holy
under ominous fluorescent guidance
they gather to witness in these,
always the last days before the rapture,
the weird and angry words of god.

-S.C. Martinez