Parking Lot

by Anthony DeGregorio

The yellow pickup
floats along the bridge’s road
and into the park.

Children in schoolrooms
daydream about dismissal
and hovering birds.

Playgrounds rise at dusk,
swings twist in abandonment,
castles blow away.

The yellow pickup’s
driver’s side door left open.
Lake water splashes

back onto the truck.
Later a cap surfaces,
drifts far from this shore.

Police close the door.
Thirty years later kids chalk
Hangman in this lot.

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Anthony DeGregorio’s writing has appeared or is scheduled to appear in various publications, including Abandoned Mine, Italian America Magazine, Aromatica Poetica, Bloom, Nowhere, Wales Haiku Journal, Polu Texni, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, Paterson Literary Review, Light—A Journal of Photography & Poetry, and The Maine Review. He taught writing at Manhattanville College for twenty years, and in another life or two, he worked in various capacities for the Department of Social Services.