TRACKS
Scent of rotting vegetation back behind the gas station
swelled to a heavy twang. Hick spies, my brother and I
brought binoculars and canteens and broke into
cattail, bramble, back to the tracks where our family
roar grew fainter, married to the groans of distant trains.
We’d perch along those flanks of steel for hours, days,
not talking, straining to see something going on
behind the neighbors’ blinded windows. Whole seasons
seemed to go that way— our having left the house a stealth escape;
our watch a hunch that others’ homes were wracked.
Houses sagged along the rail; wet wash hung down one long line.
What could happen there, where kids swung sticks and watched the sky,
where men bought nails and women widened in the glow of afternoon tv?
We stared down tracks ‘til they shrunk to a point beyond our understanding.
Back by the pump, the dumpster teemed with beer cans, bags and shoes.
This was our best game then, what staked our separate selves together.
Trying other views, my brother traipsed off down the tracks;
his voice over the walkie-talkie, dense with urgency and static,
grew vague the farther on he got, the more he saw of other peoples’ lives.
by Emily Pulfer-Terino
*“Tracks” was the winner of the 2010 Flatmancrooked Poetry Prize
