Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-six Winter 2014 |
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Red Tractor Lainey S. Cronk I could only imagine the colors of the streets, gleaming navy asphalt, dusky purple overpasses melting into emerald curves, all invisible under shining lines of traffic. Every car was silver — pewter, smoke, chromium, gray — all glistened over spinning tires, a river that never paused, slowed, breathed, or eddied. All this went on for hours and in all that time I never saw the road. In all that time not a butterfly blossomed in powdery death on a luminous silver windshield. Then, like a heart attack, like a whale suddenly happening in a decorative creek, came a red tractor. Ordinary mud clung to its flanks. Tires turned so slowly I could see each hump and gap of massive tread, between which shone the road, spreading into view like a pool of blood around the tractor’s feet as pollution spat and simmered from its rusting chimneys. The silver river must have backed up for miles, vaguely recalling the Children of Israel, but I had eyes only for the soiled crimson beast, an old and ordinary thing that possessed everything with ponderous progression, around lightly graded curves and under broiling overpasses, thick with time, slow with self-determination. What does one do with a red tractor — a ridiculously rhetorical question for there is nothing to be done except to watch, and breathe the fumes emanating from its greasy, inching heart. |
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