Party Barn by Kai Carlson-Wee

In the middle of the empty field the barn stands abandoned.
I duck through the broken door, letting my vision adjust
to the inner dark. Bottles of Grain Belt litter
the floorboards. Corn-pipes. Condoms. Marlboro Reds.
Straw from the gone swallows’ nests.
Fourteen years since I last came
back here. Same bad graffiti. Same crooked staircase
leading me up to the loft. Rafter-beams over me,
scoring the night sky, eaten away
by wind. I don’t know what becomes of love.
What purple scroll of rolling smoke
still hungers for a kiss. A thousand dead stars
leaking their false light. Freight trains riding the miles
of soybeans here to the fracking lands west.
Your breasts in the summer air. Dull light of satellites
stitching the uncut corn. I don’t know why the distance
makes it more. Why time allows this
ruined barn to bloom. Why all those nights are clearer now.
The smell of sweat and gathered dust. Mud tracks
of the river’s touch. Skin we knew entirely by moon.

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his work appears in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and the Missouri Review, which awarded him the 2013 Editor’s Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.