Justin Groppuso-Cook
​Image by JodyDellDavis from Pixabay                                                                                        
Justin Groppuso-Cook is a Writer-in-Residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project. His poems are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Autofocus, Prometheus Dreaming, Apricity Press, and Luna Luna Magazine. He received the 2021 Haunted Waters Press Award for Poetry. This summer he will be a resident at Carve Magazine’s Writing Workshops Paris. More information can be found on his website, www.sunnimani.com.
A TAPHONOMY OF CAPITAL


              Tissue paper, two cups filling                      with dew, a pothole

of shattered glass, mountains           gutted out for tunnels we pass

            through across the interstate                         further south—the missed

exits & roundabouts where                  we mistake two churches for a gas station.

                        Billboards loom:                    Adam & Eve Adult Superstore.

I use the remaining darkness                to measure the distance between

           our car & the semis drifting                            lane to lane.

On the other side of the divide:                      cascading headlights across the clear-

            cut fields, congested roads, crumbling                      overpasses, rusted-out

bridges like the shoulders of                          a bloated, fallen giant. Concrete

                        decomposes like roadkill at the woodland edge

stripped with power lines. Cross                                through Cherokee, Yellow

            Hill: reduced to a seasonal town                                of gift shops, hollowed

out buildings that the oak consumed, Santa’s Land              Amusement Park

                        & Zoo. Morning                    bleeds through cloud as if

a bandage. I pull over             to a meadow flipping with leaves

           revealing their glossy underbellies;                a peach tree sways

framed by horizon light. Children cry           out in laughter ascending

           the limbs. We barter tobacco                          for watermelon & strawberries,

direction, from their grandmother. The juice                         collects in the space

                        between our fingerprints,                  on our chins,

in the cracks of our lips plumped                     glistering.






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