I Flew In With The Boxcars

I come on like a train chasing the sunset’s pink and orange scream, shadows dancing behind me. I come on across the prairies to Kansas, past the sick and fat cows and the flooded plains. I come on to where the trees have been broken by straight jackets of ice.

I left the fear behind me, where my female body struggled to breathe. I flew in with the boxcars, a trail of ash and smoke across the middle states. America like a funeral pyre, I am reborn with the wind through the wheat and from the land.

Where first there were only trails and tracks, there are highways that crack through the seasons and roads of gravel that are washed away and renewed. There is a place north of this town where the earth’s arch can break your mind; you have never beheld so much sky up to your chin in dirt. I am gravity, you might think.

Mother knows this is one such place where nature earned its karma. Cyclones ravage the counties; wind and warmth with savage, electric nails rend trees, homes and graveyards. I scrub crayon markings off the walls and tend to ten months of dirty dishes, my babies torn from me. The storm is never ending in this state, and I learn to love its every face because it hurts me more to hate.

This primal country where my eyes melt down my face affords me no shelter. My love is always an arrow: shaped, strung and shot with its point already embedded in its target. I struggle in linear time because my heart has no faith in it. Time seems a vengeful god who demands constant sacrifice of my consciousness. I refuse to prostrate myself and have no solace in its realm, but this is the only love I have. I try to explain it.

Never mind how it sounds; I am free. My mother knows it but she disagrees with my personality. My sisters, too, are free, but they carry on with masters for their own reasons.

I spent much of my life under the tutelage of fear, a teacher whose lessons apply perfectly to one who is content to remain its student. I have been ready now for quite some time to be mastered by love instead, but they tell me it was murdered long ago when a strong man took a weaker man’s life with a stone.

We keep flying into love because it illuminates you and consumes me. We take lives with our love like this--with stones, with photographs we have misplaced, with electronic messages that have now been deleted. Fear makes love like this possible, and with rare exception the brave have no one to love but those who are afraid.