You have heard the rumor that this street ends somewhere past the railroad tracks, petering out with the last of the asphalt before a river, or a cornfield, or in a distant city at the edge of Iowa. Don't believe it. How can nothing pass into nothing without continuation? This is a street where no-one lives but everyone works, where every breath is wind-blown, and like paper driven past the stop lights over the rise in the hill to the blackened windows of a "gentlemen's club" where a neon woman, her mouth open, whispers her lie — we want you here, anything can be bought. Streets like this go on, endless in the urban sprawl of every dying city in America. So I will speak of it as a kind of prayer for the empty house on the corner of 27th, with the sloping porch and for-sale sign hanging loose on the door, everyone knowing it will not be sold or occupied, knowing that my words, with nothing left to stop them will reach beyond the Wyuka Place of Rest — est 1869, beyond the Forbidden City oriental restaurant, the Texaco, Robbins Mortuary, past the Gateway Mall, beyond this town, down the river, through cornrows, to reach another road, highway 80 or 35 and pick up speed, all the way through Pennsylvania, to New York to the Atlantic and then straight to the ears of God — a prayer of continuation, of existence, traveling the corridors of the throat saying O and again O and O, O, O. Reprinted with permission from Black Warrior Review Copyright © by Joel B Peckham, Jr

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