Bryce Berkowitz

Leaving Montana for Indiana

On a pink-gray highway outside The Badlands near Wall, South Dakota, a Bronco passes in the slow lane, cigarette smoke pours thru its cracked window. There’s a billboard for a missing girl. Another for a fried chicken sandwich. Roadside attractions, kiosks, & squat-box trailers dot the horizon. Peddlers for every form of consumption gather to hawk their goods: god & jack-a-lopes, burritos & dream catchers, heartache & love. All of it blasted down the shoulder next to gun-shot cars & rattlesnake charms, at least half of which will probably wind up in the ocean or buried in the desert. When I cross the bridge over the Missouri River into the soon-to-be-full darkness, yellow neon lights advertise: The World’s Only Corn Palace. In the parking lot, a man holds an angle grinder, a pool of sparks spills over his bare hands. On the road, the evening comes alive. The wandering sky fills with falcons, & loons croon in the night. Pink-black dusk tacks up summertime stars, & somewhere beyond Iowa, on this same endless highway night, soaring thru the faint nighttime galaxies—all the going-nowhere towns, fringe & nefarious halfway heavens & hells pinned along earth’s margins, anchored by factories & Wal-Mart parking lots & Dollar Tree strip malls, towns filled with everyday people, slamming shots, spinning outta control, until they’re pumped up, ten-feet-tall & bulletproof, hunched over pool tables, bibles, chopped-up lines, bottles of amphetamines, Reddit feeds—the night shakes its mane, & I disappear in the infinite prairie blur. White cottonwood seeds swirl in the headlights, over the glass like snow. Static white noise swells from the tires into the cab. The rumble strip hums thru my boots. The dizzying promise of a better future up ahead—somewhere. A flock of ducks crosses the highway & makes it to the shoulder. This fucking night. What’s left to say about impermanence? There’s no mystery. Just an orange peel. Nitrogen-choked air spit from a hopper. I stick my hand out the window, carve the night. This car, shape of a bullet. Tomorrow is so close, slipping into a sinkhole, holding the steering wheel, seeing the exit sign, I can’t turn away from anything: not the county line, smoke billowing from a barn fire, chat piles along a service road, funnels of blueprints leading into oblivion before a star’s collapse. Wind lifts chimney swifts into the void. I’ll never go home & sleep under blue light. Hushed fields, rusty trailers, husks of meth labs, ponds rimmed with cattails & hollow reeds. White-knuckling grassy berms, bouncing over culverts. A host of sparrows. What’s left after greased bearings, nights full of wreckage, Illinois rain, ripping copper wire out of a childhood home to buy a few low-end nights awash under biblical powerlines draping the sky like black veins? Everything. If I could break the machine, I would. I’d take a bandsaw to Orion’s belt like it was made of piano wire, open God’s voice until the heat spills out—angels, elm branches, & field mice. Drop tractor blades under pale dusted moonlight—the complexity of years, holding patterns, hydrogen, helium, all the tiny elements—& I feel so close: air filtering out a corridor, streetlights winding down, stash of pills, a handful of soil. The icing: a 1923 South Bend wristwatch. Atop the linens. Rose of Sharon. Your eyes. A spoon. September. An ode. The cold corn moon—

Bryce Berkowitz is the author of the poetry collection Bermuda Ferris Wheel, recipient of the AMC TV Pilot Award at the Austin Film Festival, and Co-Director of the MFA Creative Writing program at Butler University. He has new work in Ninth Letter, New Delta Review, The Normal School, and other publications. Find him at: www.bryceberkowitz.com.