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The blue and orange glow of the fluorescent and incandescent lights of the city below,
Dot the ground in patterns like a Lightbright from my childhood.
I feel like the world is trying to tell me something in these patterns.
Like piles of gold, yellow, and blue glitter thrown onto the floor.
Their positions against the black,
The intensity of their shine,
Something to be read.
Like tea leaves stuck in the bottom of my cup.
The glass beads, strung up on the back porch, rattled and clicked as the wind picked up; the trees, swaying south in the breeze.
Our refrigerator sounds like a bullfrog.
His fur shined like a prism against the sunlight; every hair a rainbow of color.
Where is my cat? He should be able to smell me. These Kansas winds constantly blow, taking my scent to his little wet nose, sniffing the ground in a distant cornfield.
The cellar door is open and a fan is on and blowing somewhere below. The kitchen window is propped open by another fan and the cicada songs penetrate loudly inside the room. The counters are littered with mason jars and coffee mugs. Tomatoes fresh from the garden, and various pots and pans. The oven clock tells me it’s 12:19pm but it feels much earlier than that. We are going to keep working on opening up the cellar from the outside, and do some more digging. An activity that has thoughts of wet dark soil, and toads, and caves, and a wheelbarrow in my head.
The sky splashed over the treetops and gathered in pools at my feet.
Their teeth clicked like bone and steel.
My eyes are brown, reflecting like thermal pools in the sun. My hair, from my body catching up in years, will be white as the snow falling outside my window.
My fingers are numb; covered in cuts and scrapes, raw from working in the garden day in and day out.
The nights here are different. The stars and the prairie grasses brush cheeks. The foxtails and shooting stars dancing and flirting, swaying and twisting together. The only things existing in our world are those illuminated by our headlights, and the rest is black, and part of the sky surrounding us.
It’s harvest time here. Every field is full of giant metal machines, cutting and sorting and munching up and down the rows until the sun is nearly set. Sometimes, the fields at night are full of headlights and the roar of engines.
The streetlights in town hang like black cocoons from their metal posts.
The barn lights dot the horizon for miles, being mistaken for bright stars in constellations.
Standing on the back porch, I see the first snow of the year. The barn roof has become soft and white. The junipers dark green salted with snowflakes. It falls slow but steady, a pattern of frozen water whose patterns are never the same. My blonde hair is frozen with diamonds. The smoothness of the coated yard is broken up by four sets of dog prints, and tire tracks from the truck.
Bees have been following me all day as I wander around in the sunlight.
I collected rocks from the road as we walked. Stopping constantly to stoop and pick up the pink, yellow, white pebbles. By the time we got home, my pockets were plenty weighed down with them. I pulled them all out; the flat circular grey stones stacked like poker chips in my hand, and deposited them next to the soft small ones that looked like a pile of jelly beans on the table. Now, they all sit in a glass jar, waiting for you to come home.
I would find it smart
When looking for help in a transportation station
Of any sort,
To ask the man with the cleanest
Shiniest
Most reflective shoes.
I figure that a man with time enough
To spit-shine his shoes everyday before work
Really takes pride in his job.
Helping people like me,
Is why he wakes up in the morning.
I am overwhelmed by the fact
That out of all of these people
Passing through Grand Central Station,
Surprisingly,
I am the only one wearing something
That isn’t black or brown.
I wear yellow,
The color of the lights adorning the walls,
And of the stars painted in the ceiling.
The room is filled with
Cops and business men,
A skitzo and numerous car operators.
They all have started up conversation with me,
Numerous times,
But not about the stairs I’m stretched out on,
Where a very obvious and official sign,
Prohibits my doing so.
The formations of the Badlands breaks the line of the horizon,
threatening to swallow the sun lie a massive Cretaceous era beast.
The Black Hills rise like the shadows of distant mountains beyond the trees.
The Ponderosa pines stand upon the hillside and granite outcroppings like giant sentinels.
The wind blows steady through the trees, sounding like the rolling tides of the ocean.
The moon hangs low and full over the rolling prairie like a polished rune stone,
illuminating an endless sky full of worlds a world away.
The nights here are darker, longer, deeper.
The distant echo of a dog’s barking seeming as a wolf to the imagination.
The ground shines like diamonds from the mica deposits exposed among the dirt like broken glass.
The crickets, grasshoppers, katydids chirp their songs in the underbrush,
which is entangled with wild raspberries.
We fill out hands and mouths with the tangy sweet morsels,
soft like velvet and delicate as baby birds between our red-stained fingers.
We trek with our packs among the forestry lane,
feeling as though we were the first European explorers to lay eyes upon this ancient land.
Every sight, sound, smell, and taste; a wonder.
Oil pumps dot the fields for miles,
Like giant metal bison.
Rust for fur,
And shoulders of rotating turbines.
9:30 am.
A tequila sunrise and 27 pesos later
I am sitting, balancing myself
On the plastic, graffiti-covered bus seat,
Listening to the cheesy Mexican radio
And feeling the eyes of those three men
On my body from two rows back.
We make our way
45 miles an hour
Down the narrow boulevard.
My drink splashing side to side
As the bus races around the bends
And slams its breaks on
Outside the busy gathering
Of dark skin and fruit stands.
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