Midwestern Film Summit

by Ash Adams

This place is only like the movies 

in that there are no mothers 

or they are only here to kill you.

I am not the princess or the servant girl.

I am the yard covered in pink flamingoes, 

or I am one pink flamingo 

caught in a spotlight I thought I could outrun, 

but my legs are backwards, plastic, and I have just one of them.

Really, I am the toilet-papered tree, but forgive me, viewer,

if there is no folding chair, no gaunt woman in the driveway 

smoking all the cigarettes in my mind,

yelling about how fast the cars drive by, 

how will the protagonist hold her girlfriend

in the kind of summer light that sets everyone on fire

while someone says Ohio rivers burn forever?

How will someone call her a survivor

as though it is a good thing.