Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Signs
Why not leave small offerings
on rural routes for the mystics
at the D.O.T.
who in their cabalistic
wisdom make a sign
mean less the more
of them you pass.
There’s peril in
the arrow, in its angle—up
and to the left.
A man might come from
a strange country, to travel
in the night.
An animal
might publish its uncertainty
in the median.
I want not to take literally
all indications, nor seek
secret shortcuts to
a private drive.
I am off the map.
A wayward vector, the metaphor
of S—as in here
go slow awhile,
or next 2 miles, soft
shoulder.
