Ordinary Fruit

Tongues protrude from sun-black blistered wrecks
that stare with empty steel-rimmed eyelets at
the summer sky. Like nooses around necks,
or cradles made from string to catch a cat,
their laces loop and knot. These sneakers dangle
from a roadside cottonwood whose limbs
sprawl half-dead in an awkward thirsty tangle
overlooked by shadeless canyon rims.

Imagined fingers run along the bark
and underneath their touch, these words appear:
If you're not our kind, drive along. Don't park
and never let the sun set on you here.
Yes, smile at tennies and abandoned boots
but other trees have borne far stranger fruits.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside