the sun was a letter
of the alphabet then
my stomach could pronounce it
better than my mouth
on the walk to school through
two centuries of wreckage
past a ghost village
and the end of town eaten
by the interstate
along train tracks we knew
to get off of when
they started to hum
up over the wooded hill
in the center of town
with its water tank and cemetery
past hidden rooms
with walls of wild grapevines
whispering truancy
down into the industrial classroom
a prison of numbers
where zero seemed to hold
all the keys