Road Trip

Davis McCombs

Over the singed and brittle roadside stalks,

over cotton, corn and stubble,

our car's dark bug-shape slithers.

Over the metal drainpipe, over the oil rig,

and the burned field where a windmill

cranks its pinch of rust, we are

a hurried sweep of shadow, a sleek chromatic

gleam the cold sun follows

with its blue-orange dot of concentration.

We scurry like a flea across the hide of something

both immense and underfed,

a creature from the mind’s culvert,

an animal concocted out of barbed-wire ribs

and cockleburs, the grass its rippling fur

through which our small wake passes like a shiver.