|
|
|
Noxious Weeds
by Carrie Naughton Late last night or is it early this morning I felt the earth moving and the bedside lamps rattled and cried out in reply wake up and the streetlight flickered on - wake up, we're shaking - flicked off and one lone bird cried out wake up get up and run. Early this morning or is it every morning a stranger's words killed me a little my spirit smoldered in childhood fever dreams of puffy orange balloons burning like the ends of my mother's cigarettes. Can anyone hear me cry out can anyone hear me wake up. I cried on the side of the road across from the Big Hole Barbecue across from the girls staring and gearing up their Clackacraft on its trailer to float away on the river as the sun melted off the clouds drifting up from the edges of mountain ridges. A dusky grouse saw my tears and scolded me from beneath shady stalks of houndstongue and musk thistle preened his wings whispered Confucius-style hey lady wherever you go, go with all your heart. And I was angry at the dead snakes gritty and flattened on the asphalt and I was angry at the rotting deer flyblown and damp with runoff and I was grousing yeah grousing because suffering is an art I try to ride but this afternoon - oh wake up it's every goddamn night - I let it ride me right off this road and into the gutter. There's a heat haze a smoke daze a pollen count in the billions in my brain where the rain is made of dust where the cottonwood fluff ignites like a line of gasoline unspooled det-cord a drawstring of flame a zipper ripping apart this pavement-schism down to the caldera so this cobble-and-sand conglomerate layer cake valley landslides into the desert while I'm choking on ditchweed and drinking cheap wine because it's so much more fun being drunk alone than it is being sober with you. Early this evening yes and every evening I clear my own zone of alienation like Chernobyl's poisoned perimeter that impact crater when Wormwood fell from heaven a radioactive hot glass brick or a fiery green star dripping absinthe-soaked sugar Do Not Enter remain on the periphery until I crawl out of the quackgrass like a rangy spectral cowgirl emerging from a craftshow painting nailed above a plastic-bagged bed one foot on the spongy mattress one hand clutching my limp bouquet of spurge and toadflax wake up now the walls are quaking and it's midnight in this seedy Idaho motel. |
|
