Break of Day

On dark mornings I go walking in the frozen tracks
the trucks I don’t look out for made, gloves askew,
head turned down, eardrums stuffed with sticky

rhymes from skeletal verses, and hoof prints
dirt road petrified, which I ascribe to horses,
which can’t be right, it must be boars, escaped

from rich folks’ hunting grounds, game preserve
across the highway, and the broken fence forbears
its tale, not that I’d listen, as the ledge begins

to crest, and only then do I look up to verify
that I’m alone, to make sure I’m not asked
to console another passerby, that I won’t jump,

I won’t, I haven’t yet and have no plans
to start, and I’m relieved by the diluted sun
paltering with clouds, sprawling landscape

empty of a single soul who wants to sell me
hope, and it’s a joy to turn around and unexplain
myself to scalloped ground, faltering, then falling.

Thomas Mixon has fiction and poetry in Barren Magazine, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere.