Funeral Season

Funeral Season

A new winter barrels
against the windshield.

The prairie's in rehab like Daddy
up a creek without a roadsoda.

Ozark patriarchs simmer mossbergs
and aluminum soup, these parts.

Grace is thirteen and passenger-side,
on her way to Funeral, Missouri, soon

to look at a dead ant and southern cuzzes.
Their radio preaches frequency from pulpits

of pitbulls, past Girardeau en route
61 to motel 6. Pig meat in Ste. Genevieve

bites the belly, toward the bone, below
the bible belt and right in the breadbasket.

They park a lot and pee sprite.
There are billboards for sausage festivals

and god where the sky paints itself
whatever color it wants, bored.

Grace squints fire and plays favorites.
Hers is white-blue. Daddy's is Steely

Dan. Mama's is Daddy's.
No seatbelt no dessert. Click.

Apple pocket pie burns like a sun
roof in her mouth. The mazda is set to

military time, the township approaching.
Its skyline smirks a bottomset that never

goes to a dentist. The florist shop crumbles
with caries. Further south, trees come back

to life like that dead man they can't stop
blabbing on and on about at 85 miles an hour.