Nothing Will Grow Here
It was always overcast on the
long drive out of the city.
Velvet dapples
in ochre-lit friezes;
remnants of others’ dreams
sprawling out alongside the road,
glistening and burning, shattered
yellow, white and silver
broken headlights glinting jewels amid
the wreckage of
a five car pile up sixteen miles outside
of town.
The horses do not try yet to run,
professionally broken as they are
penned in to idyllic scenes
alongside the highway,
that only we can recognize
from this distance because
at some point
instead of resisting decay
we decided
to idealise it.
Where decrepit barns
are framed and hung alongside
staged family portraits,
generations of tending livestock
through the harsh winters, fur at its thickest;
the dry summers, crops burnt and
goats restless
while chickens peck peck peck
until nothing grows here.
Nothing will grow here;
I don’t need a sign to say it.
And freedom only needs to span
so far as one can run
if put to the task,
so the fence posts are planted
until the bush, where
snow fencing runs until coils
of misremembered metal fencing,
hardware cloth sprawls
downward, half buried
in the earth it once
knew how to protect -
and if you wanted to
meander out that far
then you deserved it
you earned it,
but you had to
already know
it was out there,
had to taste it once before
you acquired an appetite
for freedom.
And now, who dares chase the wind
when we’ve built giant turbines
to do that for us?
Our ghosts glint
in the late summer sun
streaking out between
cloud striations, trees painted
in oils to look like wind and
the caution of falling rocks
where roads have blasted through
more natural formations.
But every stream eventually
erodes the land before it,
every flood destroys
the ground below to forge
its new waterbed,
where someday a child might
reach into the lake,
collect in two handfuls
of shells and sands and algae
a shard of glinting yellow sea glass,
glistening and burning, shattered;
and our ghosts
will regain their beacon, their
way home
along this highway, the
long drive out of the city.
A. A. Parr is a Canadian writer, artist and entrepreneur with a Spec Honours BFA from York University. Her debut Chapbook, “What Lasts Beyond the Burning” is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2020; she writes a weekly poetry series for and about strangers, entitled: “I Wrote You This Poem” on Channillo.com; and, she is currently working on her second literary fiction novel. She has recent work out in untethered, Black Bough Poetry, Sonic Boom, Door=Jar, and Turnpike Magazine, as well as forthcoming in Brave Voices Magazine and elsewhere. In her work, she seeks to explore difficult themes in an attempt to shine a necessary light into our darkest crevices. https://aaparr.wixsite.com/ourghosts