All night long on rusted rails
the diesel pulls through
Wisconsin’s coal-blackened towns of
crushed cars and dark sheds.
Cool dusk and the
Scent of burning wood.
Weed-tall fields
bank the rails.
Everything worn and rusted
and unwanted is dumped here.
Chicago behind us,
pushing drearily north
to forlorn depots.
College boy adventure crumbles,
in Kerouac jeans
I’m horribly and incurably
lonely.
Passing through Kenosha
dark with empty mills, coal sheds,
and shabby bungalows.
In windows here and there
jack o’lanterns burn yellow
behind sooty panes.
Mark Connelly’s fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Milwaukee Magazine, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The Great American Literary Magazine, Home Planet News, Smoky Blue Arts and Literary Magazine, Change Seven, Light and Dark, 34th Parallel, The Chamber Magazine, and Digital Papercut. He received an Editor’s Choice Award in Carve Magazine’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest in 2014; in 2015 he received Third Place in Red Savina Review’s Albert Camus Prize for Short Fiction. In 2005 Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.