Throw a Dart at a Map of Suburbia

by Jamie Castellas

Streetlamps encircle tiny patchworks of concrete and
weeds; illuminating the oil slicks, the damp fuel
receipts fallen from car doors, the rotted apple
from next door’s lawn, the mostly flattened beer
can licked clean by a curious prepubescent boy

Children drum their knuckles on mailboxes;
a metallic rhythm, an announcement of
afternoon freedom, today’s cheap passtime

Tin monsters parade down the bitumen decreeing eight turns
of an hour hand–not counting the hand frozen on a
steering wheel, the warmongering of an internal
combustion engine under the bonnet and between
the ribs, fumes procrastinating for just a few minutes of peace

Between the curtains are snippets of pixelated
memories forming a dossier ablaze in a bluish
glow that somehow keeps these families warm

A cat stalks a mouse, chasing a cockroach,
watched by a dog haunched at the sill–
a game eagerly played and paid in tiny
skeletons and domesticated roars and boxes
of arsenic too conspicuous for 21st century wives

If you zoom in real close you can find this place;
scattered tiles on a map, deceptively static from afar,
backyard playground sunburnt, bins rolled in and out.

Back in the gutter, a discarded electric bill pow-wows
with the cracked plastic lid of an old take out
container–they bemoan the cost of living crisis–
how essential and inessential they can or will
or should become; suburbia crumpled.