The American Dream

They built a Wal-Mart.
Two months after the auction,
three generations of family farm,
I watched with idle hands
as the ground was scoured
by a hulking, hydraulic beast
from an age before time,
all arms and teeth,
tetanus rusted, hawking soot,
scraped back the trees and grass
from the skin of the earth
like a scalded hog,
down to the rock and meat,
the red dirt and raw clay.

The rains came to soothe the wound.
It carried more dirt away,
tender seeds swept into concrete culverts
bound for the river bottom.
Little pebbles and rocks held onto nothing,
soil melting away from around them
like rendered lard from cracklings.

(...)

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