Perry Janes

In those days, I thought the dried-husk
chrysalis that clung to our cars
was a type of thumbprint wilderness

pressed on the city. Mornings, fish flies
rose from Lake St. Clair to paper
buildings with their ash-

figured swarm. All that spring, my father
hunched to peel them from the wind-
shield with a sticky displeasure

I woke to, their cracking pops—chill
rain tapping the rooftop. Even then, I knew
there was comfort in this ritual:

the separation of animal hunger
from its perch. In those days,
my father drove door-to-door

with glossy brochures for log cabin
A-frames papering the seats
which is just another way of saying

we were constantly aware,
my father and I, of where
we could not be: Alaska,

adulthood, each day that March
like another word in childhood's
run-on sentence of undefined

desires, the township names
my father rolled against his pallet—
Yakutat, Talkeetna, Nikiski—

blurred into a low-note hum
of engine cough and insects
caught in the fuel pipe.

Even then I knew
he would not make a sale.
Those nights, idling

near the razor weed lakeshore,
we sat beneath sodium vapor
streetlamps hovelled

in their own breathing
shell, a finery
of wings that trembled

against our labored breath
while we watched
the frail chassis peel

from themselves,
mutely, as though
without complaint.