insomniac truck stops like a net of sulfurous jewels, the leys of interstates, cloverleafs and roundabouts blacktop mandalas, prayer wheels on mountain peaks, tattered Sanskrit flags

Here the pale queen, profligate in her sleep,
the small kingdoms adjacent to hell,

the hotel-bed tithes paid in traveling salesmen fallen from their jokes, in runaways fallen from flyers meticulously stapled to telephone poles.

here the barrows, tumulus of banked earth that aligns with the sickly yellow stars., the thin scratched graves in the highway hedgerow

weeping women come from their rivers to devour children, the selkies and sirens of parking lots and roadside rests, cleaning the bloody beds of Knights Inns, the cabs of Peterbilts, beasts that idle in the endless night.