by Jed Myers

Walking, soaked, in from the coast,
backpack weighted with cloudburst,

I found a road, and believed
if I followed, I would find the world.

I trudged. The sky cleared.
I’d hitch a ride. It would get easier.

The dawn traffic was already wild
with flies, bees, tiny birds

passing close as if they recognized
I wouldn’t matter—I wasn’t here

to capture a thing. They went on
after their nectar, seeds, each other,

the lupine and foxglove like the pylons
of an airborne city. No cars

to save me from losing my name
to the hubbub and buzz. The body

and its waterlogged gear was lugged
over dozens of wind-worn rises

on the way that was the way
out of here. I was leaving

a lone human frame for the air
thrumming around me, forgetting

the game of keeping awareness in,
under the skin. In a hollow

one would’ve called hunger, a laughter
began—it filled the surround,

and mingled with chatter and song,
returned through a wanderer’s ear.

Jed Myers lives in Seattle. Two of his poetry collections, The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), are 2014 publications. His work has received Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Literal Latte Poetry Award, a Pushcart nomination, and, in the UK, a Forward Prize nomination. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, Prairie Schooner, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Lyre Lyre, and elsewhere.