WARNING: If you're offended by curse words, don't read this.
“Left”
By K.J. Hascall
9/24/06
There’s a dusty cloud following my car,
bouncing up and down on the washboard road.
The sun is bright on this autumn afternoon and the sky is blue between nomad clouds.
We roll the windows down and turn the music up.
Grasshoppers sunning themselves spring from the road,
they seem to be growing spontaneously out of the gravel
and shuttling themselves at my car: insectisuicide.
One grasshopper finds itself stuck, but still alive, behind my windshield wipers.
You pick it out and throw it across the road, while I tell a story
about smoking grasshoppers –
“You light their heads on fire and smoke their asses.”
“What, like a roach? Now that’s fucked up.”
The sunflowers on the side of the road are tangled green and yellow
blowing in the breeze by the side of the road.
The clouds pass overhead, the cornfields, brown and broken this time of year,
pass beside, and time passes like the water in the Platte.
I tell you I wish I could just drop everything and drive.
The road is lined with trees that shade half of it and paint my face with shadows
that grow longer as the afternoon lengthens.
Next time I’ll turn left instead of right and leave the day turning to dust.
The hills will be steep like they are today,
and where the road crests it will seem to end and the sky will begin –
the rolling grass conceals what you see until you’re there.
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