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.
Sink
flies over the sink.
he had more patience for them now,
didn’t care to note
the swerves of their Doppler whines.
some might accuse him
of lax affect.
or anhedonia.
but it was mystical, if only by default.
a new kind of (lack of) etiquette.
a brand new take on death.
it had never made sense,
the wholesomeness of enamel.
bleach-and-scrub
could be a killer’s shine:
thinking of knives and forks
as bones.
the crud
glued to misstacked plates
had been bitten once:
a chomp on the flank of a pig.
a gobble of turkey.
dentures probing the chest of a cow.
it didn’t matter much how you interpreted it.
but then again
not all of the objectified beast
would go down.
Brunch
when black ties acted nice
they were forming teams,
eager to resemble the same old
rich mannequins.
but the plastic jungle
was breaking apart, headed toward
aggression, falling off
a kindness cliff.
in fact, violence brought sales:
attacks on other countries.
assaults on the poor.
profitable ways to harm a planet.
to play this game
you had to hold a lot of oil-rigged cards,
shaped like yachts
or development zones.
it was all very good, as innocent as red lambs,
because none of the players
ever saw the knives,
or had a desire to slash.
Detective
so much shirking
was a collective scream afraid to speak out.
it could only protest in that way that had no voice,
one that worsened the inner pain
by sharpening the little teeth of painful jobs.
the workers of course would never say
their job was a leech on the heart.
you had to read it in the lines of facial stress.
you had to observe the sounds
within the jails of their fake words.
the little winces under the eyes.
the brief squirms along the outskirts
of the lips.
the truth languished there
in such confined moments, bashing against
restraints that were so polite,
it was hard to believe.
Chris Crittenden writes from a struggling fishing village in Maine, fifty miles from the nearest traffic light. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Vine Leaves Journal.
