UNEARTHED
Hear Poem
Streeter,
North Dakota, thrived
on its glass container factory. Now,
workers hunker by bolted gates across
from the
barred doors of the union hall,
collars pulled tightly about their necks,
eyes as vacant as main street windows.
On First
Avenue, soup kitchens work
in cramped church cellars with limp
produce and day-old bread.
Nearby, a
bony dog gnaws a parking lot prize,
raises its head, then scurries off when
a tailgate clangs shut like a cell block door.
As July
sizzles into August
and the back nine is hard,
I watch the cicada killers drag
dazed prey
deep into burrows,
depositing eggs on the stunned flesh -
live food for their hatching young.
Streeter
may yet endure this August heat.
Two miles away prison expansion unearths
the dense soil and the town waits.
