on a gravelly blacktop—three incandescent bulbs
and a milk-glass globe mixed up with elm and

Chinese elm branches and a few slabs of elm bark.
I resist sweeping up

———————-Beauty is nature’s fact:
———————-Shivelights and shadowtackle

but it’s my neighborhood, my floor lamp left out
hoping someone might want it. Guess the wind

caught it first. I’m glad no one’s shoes are cut up
(or worse) while I search out a broom, improvise

a disposable dustpan from a cardboard box,
and head back to the mosaic of stars and miniature

cityscapes I can’t let be.

/

Jannett Highfill is a Great Plains poet living in Kansas. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Common Ground Review, The Iowa Review, and The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She has three chapbooks, Light Blessings Drifting Together, Finishing Line Press, A Constitution of Silence, Green Fuse Poetic Arts, and Brown Restless Green, Finishing Line Press. She is coauthor of A Tempered and Humane Economy: Markets, Families, and Behavioral Economics from Lexington Books.