Tony Reevy 

Brick storefronts like sentinels—
framed by scrub, soybean fields—
loom skyward. Walls are cracked;
a fire escape leads nowhere.

The tracks across Main Street
gone, a gap in the woods.
Last general store closed
with gas at fifty-six cents.

Trees here third-growth, tobacco
barns rot to shells. That whine
isn’t a tractor—it’s DOT
mowing the roadside.

In the ditch, rain uncovered
a dirt-filled Coke bottle, tossed there
when someone didn’t need
to get that nickel back.

 
Tony Reevy has more than one hundred publications including poems in Asheville Poetry Review, Now & Then, Out of Line, Pembroke Magazine, The Kerf, other journals, ten anthologies and four chapbooks: Green Cove Stop, Magdalena, Lightning in Wartime and In Mountain Lion Country. His works also include non-fiction articles, short stories, and two non-fiction books. He is senior associate director of the Institute for the Environment at UNC-Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.