Poetry
Lindsay Wilson
Consumer Museher reality lies in her teeth, the way they stretch across her mouth perfectly. lies in the way she twists the long straw in her mouth, all the while keeping the half cocked grin focused on the next guy. she uses words like princess, need, the latest fashions… her eyes are like the diamonds on her wrists. and we share this glimpse across strangers and thru half dead conversations, across tables filled with dirty dishes, and even though there's a man at her table, she stops at mine after refilling her coffee, because 1 is never enough. twisting her straw around her fingers like a body and says out of the side of her mouth something about shopping, drinks and i like your shirt. i say, i'm not my clothes. the straw snaps, and i watch the tommy hilfiger tag shake disgustingly away, back to her table and the man with ironed jeans. CrossingOn our day off, from cooking for the masses and selling hippie clothes, we cross over the high plains and the long gray tongue of asphalt-in search of rare antiques. It's late summer in Wyoming and the fields are tanning away the green. The Little Laramie River has died into a creek, the edge of it like a fallen bird's wing, fluttering under the sun's fire. On the wooden boardwalk of the melancholy mercantile store, I sit half in shade, half in light, as Annie shakes down the antiques inside, futilely. Slow cars pass by on the one paved road that climbs into the mountains and the divine hot springs of Saratoga. Annie's Bug, an automatic stick shift, "…a classic," she says, from the summer of love, vapor locked a mile from Centennial on our way back. There's no choice, except to let the elderly jackass rest, and search for shelter at the Prophet Café. Cook inside wearing tie-dye, playing with his face in a spatula, looks at me like a mirror with burns on his hands, takes our order for sub sandwiches, then walks to the kitchen with his cotton mouth. We eat quietly, discussing our move to green green Washington and careers over our last meal in this town laying at the start of the Snowy Range. I lay the tip down with scarred hands and we walk one mile in the August sun, sweaty palm to sweaty palm to the Bug that would breathe again. Annie says, we were suppose to have lunch here, I only half smile. At our feet on the roadside, cutting through this miser plain, dead robin, that couldn't get to the other side, red breast drying into the wind. SwayingGod's gone and even though I know we brought Him with us I'm still searching the plains, but all I find is drying soil. Some People see Him as heat on the road. He is the water out of our faucets quenching more than the masses. And though I can not find Him today on the plains I roll back and watch the big sky fill in. Rain clouds hang low at 7200 feet, hefty hummus clouds heading east down interstate 80 giving all they can to a land that languishes in mediocrity- and wasteland's weeds swaying their goodbye as the Wyoming Wind pushes off, the only savior they'll ever feel.
Lindsay Wilson |