The Milky Way raptures Moingona. No other
town sees such a sky as the Iowans here. 233rd Street
is Moonflower Road. The village of Moingona
is like the moon, a named place sometimes sunlit
at times eclipsed by Grand Junction, Madrid,
Des Moines, and then, among the towns, alone.
Moingona is unincorporated, which means it’s without
a body, incorporeal, mines closed, tracks moved north
optics unclouded by light. More stars than Ogden.
The village prohibits street-mapping trucks whose eyes
are predatory, distrusted more than coyotes, every
specimen a suspect. Black bears, cougars, bobcats,
all spoke landscape for the State of Iowa and not
much further back, Pleistocene ice scraped a
rough gravel of it: elephantine, wolfish, leonine.
Then entered all the peoples, hungry for Boone County,
but Moingona’s no other body’s concentric center.
Nothing orbits around this place. It’s just the end
of Moingona Road, an aperture as wide as anywhere.
The cemetery’s Evergreen, the park is Shelley Park.
On a night without a moon, the dark is nearly legible.