2 Polaroids of the South, 2009

The sun hunches itself elderly over a line of oak trees behind the old storefront, while a man watches shadows grow sleepy and yawn themselves into the dirt. Neon stutters, abetting the twilight. Bats, like the dead of summer, dart above cricket drones from the darkening wild wood.

He stares at the Coke machine, at the cloud of insects around the bulb overhead. Not even they, in their heated electron swarm, can make movement on an evening like this. Resolute in its stillness, the air is a statue in the park, parting words you can't take back.

But in his head there are explosions in the sky, soundless and unseen and worlds beyond it with no idea what they have coming.