“1978 Buick Station Wagon” by Ed Skoog

Like a diplomat with an assassin

closing in, I never take

the same way home twice

through Topeka streets,

making string figure, stairstep

and spiral through neighborhoods

split and stitched across railroad

track, highway and river,

a new fugue for each journey.

I’ve never known anyone’s body

as well as I learn those roadways

of the late 1980s, each turn the turn

an idea makes, luck-damaged

and sprawled. Make of that what you will.

I myself have never understood it,

how that unremarkable American grid

compels me to connect each street

with the bouquet of song I understand

clearest through battery-animated

cassettes unspooling

in passenger side boombox. And wider,

beyond the city, I want to hear

the whole concept album of Kansas,

drive to college towns for art and donuts,

remote chapels, the ice cream store north

with its one pinball machine featuring KISS.

I have a travel placemat from before

the interstate recommending stops

along scenic hi-way 24 including Topeka,

where at the Ira Price Cafe

½ mile east of the cloverleaf junction

breakfast is served any hour, and chicken

is a specialty. It closes at 9 p.m. on Saturday

and opens in time for church

but other than that is air-conditioned and modern

24 hours a day. Maps seem earnest,

even though expulsive, and experience

may not corroborate.

The people in the little houses of Kansas

look out windows and nothing

invisible is real. There is, the placemat

assures me, plenty of parking.