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 seem alike 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.
'Flight' three: 'A southern cross past God / Way before what is know as an interstate.' Silence and a star have similar perception but are not the same; malfeasance on the road; leaving it all is all quiet, louder as it goes; 'First was the thumb, then a bus, even an —' breaking off.