by Jannett Highfill
Eating fish tacos elbows on Borges’
The Book of Imaginary Beings
illustrated by Peter Sis.
Out the window two signs
within twenty feet: Lockview
Street and Lockview Drive
but no, no lock.
The radio likes to say Teddy Roosevelt
himself christened Grandview Drive
which overlooks “Peoria Lake,”
a wider reach between the bluffs
cut by the Illinois River.
On the phone this taco joint is
a thumbnail from the Peoria Lock
and Dam. I would walk to the river
end of the road, see
whether it’s civic irony like
our Lakeview Museum on Lake
Street which at no step boasts
a water view. But maybe naming
isn’t the exclusive lookout
of the empirically minded
and Borges is tired of patience.
Jannett Highfill is a Great Plains poet living in Kansas. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Common Ground Review, The Iowa Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She has three chapbooks, Light Blessings Drifting Together, A Constitution of Silence, and Brown Restless Green. She is coauthor of A Tempered and Humane Economy: Markets, Families, and Behavioral Economics from Lexington Books.
Little Leaf Literary Journal 