Buy American

One Car Garage

Chuck Berry made Maybelline  

from the snarl of parts

he found hopelessly tangled

in a rough cut pine crate

on a high mossy shelf

above a calloused window

weeping jaundiced light

in trailing veins

across the fender skirts of a well-appointed

Cadillac shoehorned between

Mark Twain’s cobbled vernacular and Edward Hopper’s

blackened crucible

curved lip spackled

with the flat light of day and late night shadow.

White wall tires

suggest life preservers to Hank Williams

drowning in the deep plush

of the back seat

while Louis Armstrong and Arthur Miller

uncoil jumpers

and argue whether it’s red to red

black to black

or the other way around.