—originally published in Through a Distant Lens: Travel Poems February 2014
If the tan Converse dangling
up there,
on those very wires
we ourselves use
to converse,
could tell a story,
perhaps they mention
how they’d managed to fly,
break gravity
like I did recently
to come here,
to this street in St. John’s
Portland, OR;
or perhaps it would
be a converse story
and say that they’ve been
hanging out
forever there to make
me wonder,
while I sip chai
across the street.