Word Choice features original works of fiction and poetry. Read five poems by Ronnie Yates, with art by Sarah Muehlbauer, selected by Jozeph Herceg.

Gulf Freeway, Houston

The leaves and birds are elsewhere,
Having left the city despite a tropical climate
In which everything grows. The glass
In the buildings, the muscle-y engines. Even the trees,
Black and bereft of leaves, grow fiercely tangled branches
Clawing at cables strung across a vast blue. Beside the swollen
Concrete artery of the freeway, crowning the steep gable
Of Philip Johnson’s copy of Ledoux’s House of Education,
The white pillars of an open-roofed, glassed-floored
Tempietto hover above a university. At night,
A dead-skinny, hare-brained Christ-girl hides there
Above walls of globed lights and floating Tuscans
That make the cavern of an atrium beneath the glass
Under the furred blades of her feet. Her hands so small no one sees
The wounds inside them. Her flying saucer eyes
Haunt the freeway. And passing there
In my sister’s circus red car, I think of her salted away
Among the pillars holding up a smoky night sky
Aglow with the lights of refineries, her shy and alien
Manner, and feel something glowing in me
Like a tumor.

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