the telephone pole
He stood beneath the telephone pole and heard the wires humming. He remembered the sound, and that summer, and this very spot where he picked up her last call. He looked up. The sky today was bruised. It had loved too hard. The cables, spindly silhouettes in the falling dark, ferried nothing of consequence, nothing of her. He reached out and touched the coarse wood of the pole. He waited. The light was fading quickly. Somewhere between the orange and the violet, stars began to blink awake.
