Carol M. Highsmith, Ominous clouds above Pine Bluffs, a small farming community on the Nebraska border in Laramie County, Wyoming, 2015
Digital photograph
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Some of us were honed like knives in butcher shop back rooms
and some of us were strung like meat,
preserved in purgatory chill, a waiting room just cold enough
to kill what wasn’t dead already. Our parts,
precise and patient, as we never had the chance to be.
I remember how
we played with tangram shapes
in Mrs. Hoffman’s first-grade class and in junior high school
hypnotized ourselves with Tetris squares.
I see them sometimes when I cannot sleep
and sometimes driving, pixelated
raindrops floating upward on the windshield,
pieces of a wave that crashes backward in slow motion.
This is all to say the parts of me
have never fit quite right. Now I know that
some of us were free-
range kinds, traipsing out
beyond the fences built to keep us grounded.
I’ve thought of you for years.
If some mouths depend on your destruction for survival,
if the sound of truck tires bouncing off the interstate
sets your skin on edge and makes you bare your bottom teeth,
if you hopscotched past the cattle guard and hitched your way
right back into a row of stock, staring out
as little girls in cars flew by, their eyes
as moony-wide as yours, maybe you can tell me
why the hooks grow sharp.
And maybe we have met before, our futures dangling out ahead,
more violent than expected
and colder than we’d hoped that they would be.