Truck Around Town: Poems
Around Town I Keep Seeing a Truck with the Words Wet Panties Decaled Across the Windshield
She likes it rough in the country,
the truck’s backside proclaims.
Which country isn’t obvious:
the strawberry fields gone to rust
beneath the pickers,
or the scrub expanse
where brush fire sprouted
liquor store, trailer park,
pry-barred ATM. One might guess,
of course, the country is America—
where it takes 37 muscles
to frown but only 3 to fire.
If you can read this,
you’re in range,
the truck says, but I was born
in range, wasn’t I?
Knee high to where
my grandfather propped
a shotgun against an easy chair
like a metal jacket,
a weapon he did not need.
The more people I meet,
the more I love my dog
the truck insists &
I think of my own dogs
named one-by-one from sermons
my grandmother knew
through repetition:
Amos, the prophet, the keeper,
insisting he will not be satisfied,
Abel, who will not come when called
for fear of where other voices
have used his name. One afternoon
two boys came to the door
in shirts sleeves and skinny ties,
overheard the babysitter calling—
Amos! Abel! & joked:
I see you’ve already heard the Good News,
their smiles a plea for reprieve.
I love to tell that story:
How many other doors
they must have knocked on,
porches protected
by the second amendment?
What we call a thing
pushes or pulls us together
a pledge or an allegiance.
a wifebeater. A shotgun seat.
Now when my daughter
returns from school
wants to know
what’s indivisible,
what should I tell her?
Does it mean anything
without a kind of faith
in the people we never wanted
to be stuck with?
Someone who can see
their own reflection
in a stranger’s tinted glass
and not need to look away.
When My Daughter Slugs Her Best Friend at Day Care
Why should I have to
tell the teacher:
stars explode,
a seed bursts open.
Even atoms steal.
Right now,
in the quietest rooms,
the second hand cracks,
does not ask the future
for an invitation.
Where does a girl
learn to sandbag,
to wallop,
if she is not also
the violence
her father begged
his father not to
sink to?
A girl in the womb
grows all the eggs
she’ll ever have
like a nesting doll
of unlived stories.
Time itself
like a roiling sea
ready
to return the world
to flood.
images via Unsplash and Pexels
About the Author
Sarah Carson’s poetry and other writing have appeared in The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and The Christian Century, among others. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books, 2022).
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