Your tongue can’t get rid of it. When you sing on flatbeds, you sing Atascadero, on hay bales, on barbecue pits, on cords of chunked oak, always you sing Atascadero. All your songs about helicopters and hot air balloons and train-tracks track back to Atascadero, but you don’t hear it. You swear you sing a thousand other cities—tent cities and cloud cities, cities of brick chimneys, windmill cities and cities of apple trees, blackbird cities—and you swear your voice has galloped all the railroad bridges between them, but Atascadero sticks like a broken toothpick between your two front teeth. You’re tongue can’t get rid of it, like a mockingbird, when you sing other cities, windmill cities windmill cities, repeating the intervals you’ve heard in Atascadero’s liquor stores. You hear what you want, and you sing a thousand other names of only one name while you pedal your bicycle around town, one name as you pry up railroad spikes or fingerpick for loose change. After the earthquake imploded the brick jewelry store on El Camino, you never left Atascadero. Your Thames is a dry creek bed off Traffic Way. Your Empire State Building is a wooden crutch you found behind the AM/PM. Stop pretending. Atascadero isn’t England. You’re not America. You’ve always lived here. You’ll always live here. Here’s your dollar and your brown bag of beer and your cigarette. Now sing.

If you are a brother or a sister and you’re reading this, then you know about distance, you know about lattice fences and locked doors and fists thrown over the macaroni- and-ham-slab dinner table. You’re old enough to know about soap-in-the-mouth for a curse against your father, the rumbling of work boots down the hard-wood hallway. If you’re from a small town, then you know about the sound of work boots, and coffee pots, and the diesel engine warming up outside your bedroom window. You know the sound of your sister leaving for Long Beach, leaving for college without saying goodbye (not because she doesn’t love you); Sarah of the softball scholarship, Sarah of the Long Beach officer assaulted, of the finger sliced on the throwing hand, Sarah of the school expulsion, of the return home to work with a Bud-Lite and her uncle’s lumber yard to pay back her mother for lawyer’s fees, to marry a man with one beard, one horse trailer, and two DUI’s, to move to Susanville without you, without saying goodbye not because she doesn’t love you, and she won’t come home for Christmas enchiladas, and not because she hates your mother’s monkey bread or tuna casserole or key lime pie, but because she hates how you happen upon a dead dragonfly in your driveway. You know hate too. If you have a family, then you know about distance between a sister with a cigarette and a mother with a bible, and you know the part of you that hates them both for that distance, that hates yourself for moving to a parking lot named Kalamazoo for a desk and a library and each day saying nothing as you walk in and out of buildings about your sister and your mother to your sister and your mother. But you’ve never stepped into that distance not because you lack love, not because of your new job or the gym membership or because of the television, but because you know space inside the family never gets smaller. And who are you to change that?