Rewrites
Here are a couple (literally, a couple: two) rewrites from the end of the year. I haven’t written a thing since. But I feel like posting. Yeah:
Union Pacific
We sat, seventeen, wrapped up
in the steel trill of traintracks,
the dank of farm air caught
under the cuffs of our jeans.
You whispered wanderlust
in between hollow whistles
as we walked back, ryegrass
nipping at our knees, our backs
turned to the trains chattering
transience behind us.
In your car, we kept time
on the dash and counted stagnant
green road signs of the cities we’d escape to,
where Orion paled to skyscraper-lit skies.
And at each pit stop, we’d grip fast
the leather of your seats,
planning roadtrip summers,
marveling at the snaking maplines
we traced with our fingers, touching
nails, biting lips, and nervously tonguing
the future caught between our teeth.
Coal Dust
Your house tasted green,
like the cabbage roiling away
on the four-burner stove, white-baked-
brown from spills and scrubbings.
As you cooked
gwumpkies, stuffed thick
with beef, rice, tomatoes,
onions, grown outside
in soil turned by your hands,
you were forced to switch pans,
back and forth, so as to leave space
for the potatoes that you had left
for me to peel under the lip
of the laminate counter.
And as I learned,
grating horseradish, rolling
out pierogi, punching down
warm, rising sourdough,
the stove boiled away,
the broth and the water simmering,
whistling the same, even tones.
In the spaces between chores,
we danced to polka records
on your old turntable,
the brittle black discs so scratched,
they relied on your humming to remind them
of their rhythm, the accordions and fiddles
whining in step with your feet,
which danced patterns colored
with the grey and blue memories of your
Pennsylvanian coal dust childhood.
