Midsummer

You know what it's like when you step into a room 
and every head swivels in your direction? How quickly 

the comfort you've become used to as you move around 
in your skin, in this world, can be unsettled. You follow

the GPS map, wondering why a wedding rehearsal dinner 
would be held near a cemetery—but this is a small town 

in the midwest, blond as the silk wrapped around the corn
growing thick and high in summer. After three wrong 

turns, you pull into a driveway hoping to ask for directions. 
There is a subgenre of horror whose elements include

an isolated rural setting, superstition and suspicion;
folk who band together against outsiders stumbling into

their community. This is the point where the odds are
even: either nothing could happen, or anything could happen.

You'd hear the wind blow through the fields, an animal bleating
in the trough; the click as a weapon is chambered  and cocked.