"A Barren Tree with a Dried Sparrow’s Nest
near a Desolate Soup of Strange Biology" by Margaret Crocker
we are going to get marcus.
marcus speaks in television commercials.
his speeches have become totally vintage.
“we'll be right back!”
he says,
over and over.
and we will.
after these brief messages.
when people get older, they talk.
people who have hated people for years
get older
and talk to the people they hate
in an agony
of confession.
they need to tell you everything.
i
will tell you everything.
in missouri, there is a town called rockville
which sits at the bottom of the only plinth of rock
in a wide neighborhood of prairie.
the rock is a mammoth wall
against the town,
and the town
a snivelling footnote to its very existance.
in the shadow of this rock,
upon which a pair of actual fucking eagles nest,
human things
also actually exist, if you can believe it.
trains arrive and depart.
chickens feed.
humans love and do not love.
goats and donkeys do not graze, but are fed,
as reliant upon schedules as you and i.
think about that,
for a moment.
your schedule
and a donkey's schedule
are probably the same.
look,
the thing is
the juxtaposition
between humans and this ever-loving rock, see?
the van lumbers over railroad tracks,
past bare fields
and the detritus from the one and only
rocky crag above,
as we collect marcus from his home
at the base of what was once,
surely,
a place of worship and awe.
“I'm loving it!”
he tells us
as we guide him into his seat,
one bare cliff towering above us in smooth detachment
from the fleas at its base.
we pull out of his driveway
to face the genetic engineering company
opposite the sparse settlement of rockville
and see
a barren tree
with a dried sparrow's nest
near a desolate soup
of strange biology
in the long fallow ground
between the factory
and god.