Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Eighteen
Winter 2008
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Indiana
Russell Jaffe

The nineteenth state, the smoke stacks. The

aluminum rusting on cars.

I saw a barn where cows are birthed.


Nine cows are born every day.

No one said how many were killed.

The sign was painted red, its post


molding to the ground. Wasted fields.

Abandoned cars, cheap as booze glass.

Your roadside pathos. Your pebbles

 
lodged in shoes. Chicago runoff.

What runs from New York to Jersey

gets tangled in gardens. This is


the Midwest. To Gary, jobless.

84.3% Black.

11.9% White. 2


% Native American.

The 2000 census claimed it.

Eight years since then, look West to crowds


of people and movement, so clean.

The conversations organized,

Gary, your 40 is half full.


The booze is cheap, but you never

forget, no, booze remembers

like an old bandsaw. How, how, how


we used to work. Industry North.

The industry picked up and went

to Chicago. I said it. Damn!


The cost is great. The cost is great.

For what I once knew as a home

or, better, in place of a home


is now the ker-plunk of quarters.

Roadside tolls, bored snipers, dead cops,

Indianapolis bound, like


stairs surrounding the inside of

a cock. Hard, pointed up, bad climb.

The city's concrete pants are stained.


Bad joke. Monument to what else.

The price of this garbage can is

only a fish coffee odor.


I am not the moment itself;

I am not a great architect

of language; shacks are falling down.


I would like to say birds cough here.

They don't. The road pollutes itself.

The oily water stains the sun.


The dirt is on my tongue. Spit hands.

The farm equipment rebelled a

long time ago. Like veterans,


they soak outside of farms and die.

The blue sky is boring as fuck.

The highway price is great.


Other things aren't.

Indiana,

I have taken to America.

About Russell Jaffe

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