I watch the drought blitz through ranches, soil so fed up
it leaves without giving notice. I stop for gas, scrape off
layers of bugs splattered and smeared across my windshield.
I pour myself a cup of coffee, thick as the first oil that shot up
from Spindle Top. I take a seat next the window, dust
on the glass make folks going by look like etch-a-sketches.
Two old cowboys sit in a booth next the cash register.
They sip shots of double espresso and poke fun at their ailments:
busted bones screwed into plates they declare need a good oiling.
“Time was,” one said, “that you could hear sorghum and wheat shoots
hum like love-sick prairie dogs. Now you can’t hear anything except
the sun drilling down like a scorpion stinging the fields with its sun baked tail.
“By the time my wells played-out,” said the other, “the fields weren’t
even hospitable to noxious thistles or bindweed. I watched silver tanker
trucks leave with my profits as creditors arrived with their due bills.
The cowboys ordered another round of espresso. I left wondering
if there was such a thing as a manual that told you how to dismember
your ranch before it foreclosed or ways to pray to end the drought
before your sanity blows away with the dust.
Dora Robinson was raised on an Appaloosa breeding ranch in Southern Wisconsin.
Many of her poems are inspired by her respect and appreciation for the landscape and and people of the Great Plains. Her poems have been published by The Texas Poetry Calendar, Rio Review, Edge and other publications. Her poems, “Ghost Town” and “Toad and Badger will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Coal City Review.