The only catcall whistle is the squeaking of the local grocery store’s automatic door echoing into the almost empty parking lot when a few of us stragglers are making the almost-forgot milk run at 10pm 

 

And we all compare neighborhoods by how many traffic lights they have, how many drunks there are next door, how wide the shoulders are 

 

And the asphalt has memory here, more specifically the potholes, that we timed on the school bus like advanced physicists because if we got it just right, we could fly 

And the tax dollars take decades to trickle into road repairs letting our childhoods linger a while before they are paved over  

 

And the boredom is a tractor tempting our engines, it’s all gonna take as long as it takes, and what are we in such a rush for?

Small towns move slow but fear rest 

The clean unclobbered hands a sign of shame 

 

And the forests have needles of metal on their floors to accompany the beer bottles and the cigarettes. Nothing grows from this kind of compost it just sits and waits and waits 

 

And they were going to make ‘Born to Run’ our state song 

Springsteen had grown up in a small town like mine 

Wrote about his father becoming one with the local dive barstool 

About the teens who married first loves because there weren’t others to find  

In the final vote on TV, a Senator stood up and asked a question:  

Why would you choose for an anthem of your home 

One that sings only of running from it?  

 

And just like that, every radio dial dived in protest 

And the kids in the abandoned viaducts sprayed the chorus in graffiti notes 

And the older couple that owns the farmstand began to waltz 

And the cornfields became soundwaves from the river to the summer camp 

And the diner windows quivered in syrup 

As the old methodist church choir switched faiths a moment in praise of our small, our stuck, our one-road masses 

 

But the vote was lost anyway, so we shook our heads over bad coffee 

And spat one resounding, tobacco coated ‘Cityboy…’

 

He cannot know 

That running and arriving have no meaning 

If you do not know deeply the soil from which you started

That town which, despite you never choosing it back 

will still hold you close when you return.