A Sunday Drive Through Kansas
The road was a flat sheet,
a Nascar announcer’s voice
between waves of static. Corn,
shriveled from unseasonable drought,
I waved at the oil wells we passed
and counted them through the window
crunched with brown grass as I laid
in a ditch, among fields of broken glass
and found the station wagon,
now upside down, Garth Brooks-
from out of nowhere
another field of soybeans dried
until the following week when it rained
and our crops drowned.
Grandma told us
next summer we’d replant tomatoes.
That fall,
I pulled sharp slivers out of my hair
piece after piece.
