Just had my poem “Escaping Our Prairie Town” published online with The Rising Phoenix Review.

Escaping our Prairie Town

Unemployed we bulldozed through the streets
and waited for the dusk to cover us.
We searched for ways to rise above our veins
filled with the oily blood of our fathers’ past,
the DNA of a roughneck’s full regrets.
We knotted the shoes of soda machines and pulled.
They fell.  We watched as they ached and belched
their twelve ounce cans. We gathered them up
in the hope of trading them for a six-pack of beer,
then drove away and laughed our pirate laughs,
our thoughts of transcending that lonely place
surrounded by a sagebrush moat we knew
too well. We finished at the edge of town
and listened to the wind screaming to get out.

I don’t have a lot to add to the poem outside of noting the extensive use of iambic feet and personification to try to convey the emotional tone of the piece.

In some ways, you never escape the place from which you you came.