Poem: Barstow Junction

 

Barstow Junction

dry nettlesome air,
it had the heat of a femur-long railroad spike,
nailing him to the motel bed,
or pinioning his knees to pray.

crows added more cast iron,
hundreds listless
on the weapon held by the telephone poles:
that long, vein-sized garrote
constricting the pulse of the town.

Barstow wasn’t round or flat or social or open,
it was a sluice of squares,
an ooze of commodities, chains
of hellbound freight.

its DNA was a snarl of
business molecules loaded on
squeals of metal that whined across
miles of sluggish boxcars.

many victims plodded by–
ore and bitumen, cattle and timber,
suffering the great desert,
enslaved to soulless deposits of cash,

so very small.

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This poem was originally published in Full of Crow in 2014.   I am going to start re-publishing poems I published in the past on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.