My name is Podrigotuma and I'm often awake in the middle of the night and I like

looking at things in the middle of the night looking at the window or going

outside and seeing what's there and listening to the sounds of a city or the

countryside in the middle of the night because things sound different then

things that are strange become familiar or calm down and things that are

familiar become very strange.

Transubstantiation by Molly McColley Brown

It's the middle of the night. I'm just a little loose on beer and blues and

battered air and all the ways this nowhere looks like home. The fields and

boarded houses dead with summer. The filling station rowdy with the rumor of

another place. Cattle pace the distance between road and gloaming inexplicably

awake and then the bath-tops littered in the pasture for sale or salvage or

some secret labor stranger than I know. How does it work again the alchemy that

shapes them briefly into boats and then the bones of great-failed beasts and

once more into keening copper bells before I even blink. Half a mile out the city

builds back up along the margin. Country songs cut in and out of static on the

radio. Lord most of what I love mistakes itself for nothing.

This poem comes as part of an interlude from a book that explores imaginatively

the legacy of a building and an institution called the Virginia State

Colony for Epileptics and Fiebel-minded which is a true place she grew up

near it and this poem as part of the interlude and in this interlude we're in a

nighttime vista that seems to mistake itself for nothing in a abandoned place

...