Why Anyone Would Choose to Live Here

Passing travelers, having searched for a dinner 
with local character, end up at Red Lobster.

They know this isn’t Boston, Chicago, or LA, 
but couldn’t there be a diner, pizzeria, or café

that exudes terroir, even dilute, even abject? 
Most locations aspire only to be the objects

of prepositions. North of which. From which. 
Out of which. Beyond which. Contented with

their lack of status, they thrive as environs
for a thousand dramas that only a curmudgeon

would dismiss, if part of the community.
Twelfth-grade couples departing for different cities

need nondescript burger joints in which to dread it. 
Fathers on kid weekends and mothers who’ve had it

with being asked to bake need mediocre cookies 
at reasonable rates. The woman who has finally

decided which man to keep needs a forgettable 
restaurant in which to state the regrettable;

her soon-to-be-ex will weep but later be unable
to recall his untouched steak, the candle, the table.

The cemetery, boasting zero famous persons, 
draws true mourners, bearing generic blossoms.

It’s easier to begin again in a place that doesn’t mind 
being backdrop, that lets its characters outshine

the landscape, that doesn’t need to be the subject 
of every sentence. Resistant to lore, the hamlet

doesn’t see itself as settling. It prefers to be setting.
It quietly offers something to wear, something

to eat, a freeway entrance, a room to wake in,
a field, a lake, an empty page on which to begin,

so that anyone alive enough, or disturbed
by enough desire, has a shot at owning the verb.

Read more from Issue 23.1.