Rabbit and Rose
Afterwards will we wonder, will we even think about who capitulated and who fought and who just hunkered down and tried to breathe? Here? There?
Who took their jobs, who drove the tanks parked in high grass in Northeastern Oklahoma where the pipes will run? Who ran the floor, who hit the alarm, who traveled to London for Christmas from their executive homes in Danville?
Will there be so much tonnage, tortured plasm traveling the germ trails and slopping death that we won't think back when it bucks and rolls its eyes and charges left, slamming to the ground where all Hell Breaks Loose?
Why are their tanks parked in Northeastern Oklahoma? Why are their bombs parked in North Richmond? Why are there chickens in my bathroom?
I was born in a sacrifice zone, full of sacrificed people, Garvin and 23rd. To have a Monster hunkered between us and the water means more than some know.
When you eat oil, when it pays bills you keep the sacrificial wounds, duck and cover. Turn arounds pay good. Turn time around.
I tape up the doors so my kids don't breathe the fumes. We had to bring in the dog, the cat, the chickens for the Last Big One.
Flock gripping the edge of the tub in the bathroom, braced for sure disaster with the rest of us.
That cloud is still there, time moves back and forth: we are just coming here from the oil fields of Oklahoma, pure stolen . . . We are milling into the maw of Standard Oil . . . We are watching the news as a Bomb Train explode in North Richmond . . . We are carrying chickens while my dark haired daughter screams silently from inside the upstairs window scared to death . . . We are watching as Indians are arrested in the North country as eco-terrorists, and executives back from Christmas in London speculate lucratively on our timely demise . . . While that cloud gathers and holds and dissipates over sacrificed zones and turn arounds, monsters and longman, tanks and chickens, capitulators and warriors alike.