Poetry

After the Crazy Mountains

Marigolds in the breakfast eggs
A bottle of green light a sill
Something liminal
The road sighs spits
Gravel flashing with glass
Heat lightning
Apache tears
His voice lurching through
Phone lines over borders
Ninety degrees in a room in Butte
The carpet audibly green
An eighty-ton steel Madonna
On the Continental Divide
Marlboro in the towels the sheets
On a wall "Anaconda Meat"
Signs for Tongue River,
Browse, Silt, and No Name
"A woman traveling across
the plains with a wagon train
of emigrants went insane"
Exhaust exhalations dropped
Like gauze from a plane
The migrant workers
Bright shirts bent flowers
They stoop through it their backs
Dusted fruit trucks of beets
At dusk a man crosses a street
Fingers on the clumped throats
Of poppies stems their roots
Sweep the asphalt the country