By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Before the interstate, a southern cross, self-igniting road mistakes, and hitchhiking's first thumb turn leaving everything into a quiet departure that grows louder as it begins.
The poem sets travel in an older geography, somewhere before official roads and before certainty hardens into infrastructure. Silence and a star may have similar perception because both are distant and commanding, but one is absence while the other burns. The closing movement from thumb to bus makes escape feel improvised, as if flight begins in pure exposure and only later finds structure.
This 'Flight' sets escape in an older geography, 'A southern cross past God / Way before what is know / as an interstate', where the act 'was a chance' weighed in second thoughts: 'Did I think once / When I thought twice.' Its finest distinction holds absence against fire -- 'Silence and a star, / have similar perception, / but they are not the same' -- while road 'Malfeasance' burns 'themselves' up. Departure grows as it begins, 'all quiet; louder / as it gets going', and the page breaks off mid-vehicle: 'First was the thumb, / then a bus, even an'.