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Visiting the Ghost Town of Rodney
—after Eudora Welty’s photograph Cemetery / Rodney
By John Zheng
Death is life’s cul-de-sac
where souls turn around
to a place called
either heaven or hell
to enjoy or endure
their next life,
never knowing the place
where they once lived
has decayed into
a no-man’s-land
of abandoned houses,
churches, shops
and weedy vacant lots
to accompany the dead.
John Zheng’s poetry collections include The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville, 2023) and A Way of Looking (Silverfish, 2021), which won the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award. A recipient of the 2024 Mississippi Arts Commission poetry fellowship, Zheng teaches at Mississippi Valley State University.
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