Oh, What Strange Creatures Are These?
The jackhammer is close enough that when it first breaks ground I can feel my trailer shake with the earth. This poor earth. This poor poor earth. It burps once, sends its fumes up tubes we have stuck straight down this delicate throat, and we blame the President. And underneath this concrete I believe there once used to be soil. I believe this soil once took seed. I understand that once, flowers may have grown there. My trailer shakes a jackhammer shimmy. It is 7:30 on a Saturday morning, and I know that when the asphalt cracks the flowers on the hillside bow down their petals to see the graves of their loved ones so violently shaken. They raise up their petals, sending seed back to the long strangled soil.
There is a machine that follows the jackhammer, scooping aside chunks of asphalt in great elephantine scoops. I cannot see it, but the scrape of its beak against the ground sounds just like the chain-link loops against metal from when I was a child on the playground swing. ccccrrrrrrrrk crrrrrrrk crrrrrrrrik. Even at 7:30AM on a Saturday I can be grateful for this recollection. When we were kids we would lie with our backs in the saddle, tip our heads till our long blond tips of our hair would drag in the dust, wrap our summer-kissed legs round the chain-link allowing gravity to pull our stomachs away from us, give them back, pull them away again.
I do not understand how I have gotten so suddenly big. I do not understand why the asphalt ever suffocated this earth. I do not understand why we war, why we love, why we fuck or why we build, then destroy, then build again. The asphalt buckles. When you hit them hard enough, all these things we have made will break.
My legs are much thicker and longer now. My stomach leaves me with much less hesitation. My hair is not blond or long. I think we swing for the same reason we dance. Or play music. Or laugh. Or sleep. Or write. Or believe in gods. Or bleed. Or breathe. This is still a great mystery.
The sound of the jackhammer is dim in the distance now. Up the street on 11th and Chicon there is a sunflower growing out of the crack between the road and the curb. It is impossibly large. Behind it there is a discarded plastic soda bottle. And if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to pick a side, I would lie down flat next to the sunflower, bend my petals down to her beautiful face, ask to be sent back to the places from which we came. There is energy inside of me--it is ancient as water--it is not mine. This jackhammer buckles asphalt, me and the flowers, we bend our petals towards the earth underneath. Listen for the ghosts of seeds to sigh.
All this we have built, all this can be broken.
There is a machine that follows the jackhammer, scooping aside chunks of asphalt in great elephantine scoops. I cannot see it, but the scrape of its beak against the ground sounds just like the chain-link loops against metal from when I was a child on the playground swing. ccccrrrrrrrrk crrrrrrrk crrrrrrrrik. Even at 7:30AM on a Saturday I can be grateful for this recollection. When we were kids we would lie with our backs in the saddle, tip our heads till our long blond tips of our hair would drag in the dust, wrap our summer-kissed legs round the chain-link allowing gravity to pull our stomachs away from us, give them back, pull them away again.
I do not understand how I have gotten so suddenly big. I do not understand why the asphalt ever suffocated this earth. I do not understand why we war, why we love, why we fuck or why we build, then destroy, then build again. The asphalt buckles. When you hit them hard enough, all these things we have made will break.
My legs are much thicker and longer now. My stomach leaves me with much less hesitation. My hair is not blond or long. I think we swing for the same reason we dance. Or play music. Or laugh. Or sleep. Or write. Or believe in gods. Or bleed. Or breathe. This is still a great mystery.
The sound of the jackhammer is dim in the distance now. Up the street on 11th and Chicon there is a sunflower growing out of the crack between the road and the curb. It is impossibly large. Behind it there is a discarded plastic soda bottle. And if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to pick a side, I would lie down flat next to the sunflower, bend my petals down to her beautiful face, ask to be sent back to the places from which we came. There is energy inside of me--it is ancient as water--it is not mine. This jackhammer buckles asphalt, me and the flowers, we bend our petals towards the earth underneath. Listen for the ghosts of seeds to sigh.
All this we have built, all this can be broken.
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