Why a Kansan is Burning His Own Field

A shorn grass edge talks down but you can’t talk down
a blazing pasture. Now, gasoline crackles rainbows over wheat stubble.
A floating mountain drunk-fights skeletal cornucopia,
brush-pile of loan principal, weeds, disease, insects,

and suicide weather. A melon-orange ladder to nowhere, shaking in smog.
Breasts of Medea, all the anger bleeding out of
young mothers, tired of bursting with perfect tenderness in every eternal
moment. This despair, mirage like a bending scarlet creek climbing clouds.

Sunset crackling in the wrong direction. Elijah’s chariot hovering in plumes, nesting
into the fantastical sublime. The ring of fire, a woman yelling, rending apart as a baby’s head
crowns. Afterbirth of sulfur, three carbons, tars, liquids, poisons, particulate,
oxides, dust. Crop-burning fingerprinted a haze over Delhi

that never wiped close-to clean. Why wait for
a fourteen-million dollar grant to graph how much particulate,
sometimes invisibly fine-grained, slips into one of our breaths? Research questions as
sophisticated as wondering if a man who cheated once will do it again. Whatever dust hid

all sunlight from the dinosaurs post-asteroid, slimmed the Himalayan glaciers to an ice pick
is a similar narrative told in the air happening from Kansas to Oklahoma,
as miles of open grasslands immolate for days. Razing through
debris, weeds by fire to shock the living shit out of the pasture,

farmers repeat is the fastest, cheapest restart. Hopeless shrug. Mild peril. Forced Spring.
As the world names and then buries downwind towns, nesting pheasants,
home in black carbon. Smoke blossoms stick, every April, to the horizon. Winnows
children whose grandmothers can’t move away,

not being carefree and rootless as
tinder-dry wind twisting into conflagrations,
curling thermal signatures in tall grasses,
dancing up and down tornado alley, speaking in tongues before leaving.