Crop rows turn like flip-book pages. The story goes,
a combine paces in a wheat field and the sun
overhead breathes like a stepfather. Another drought
will wake soon, stumble down walnut rows, and knock
pictures from hallway walls. In a pear grove,
a boy and his sister finger-draw
on a dusty Honda Civic. Their mother’s
day won’t end until she loads
two-dozen white buckets with almost-ripened
pieces of a land now called “California.”
Another young mother in a place like Akron, Ohio,
eats some California on her fifteen.
Outside Coalinga, I think of my own mother,
and, for the first time, consider what it really takes
for a twenty-seven-year-old who’s just left her
abusive husband, the only town she’s ever lived,
and her mother and father and brothers—
a twenty-seven-year-old with two children under ten
to feed and house and clothe with almost no money—
I consider what it really takes for her to break
the silence with a fart joke, as my mother did
when we passed the feedlot. Cows
squeezed to the trough. My sister and I laughed
on the backseat. My mother’s eyes held us
in the rearview mirror of our Toyota Starlet.
Erik Wilbur 