OCR Text |
Show The Drought Every lawn in Little Rock has burned the yellow of your hair. By the Texaco station on Route 3 a young girl steps onto a bus, rushing into her adolescence, pink curlers clipped to her scalp, an infant whining in her arms. The farmer in the booth behind us in the International House of Pancakes says the drought's got us all by the balls. You draw a landscape on your place mat, a house inked black, flowers half open like the eyes of children fighting sleep. Two faces, blank as the soles of shoes, jut out of an upstairs window. Is it too late to forgive each other for our lives gone wrong, for New York City where we slept in the kitchen by the open oven door nights when we could see our breath in the bedroom, windowpanes glittering blue, the prayer plant collapsed, its mane thrown to one side, rats tunnelling in the wall behind the bookcase, trying to wait out the winter. It's still hours before noon. We go back to our room and make love, the window fan circling endlessly in its cage. Outside children, furious with morning, stampede the hill, climb toward the horizon, roe eggs in their hands painted cerulean blue. |