These poems are from a series inspired by reading Atlas Obscura stories while listening to a music genre randomly selected from my list. The poems were written immediately after reading, still while listening to the randomly chosen music. Please share, click the clapping hands below, or throw me a dollar for coffee if you enjoy these.
Along the Remains of Route 66, Road Trip Trash Has Become Treasure
(read the story here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/route-66-trash)
minimalist piano (Philip Glass)
This lite beer bottle will be worth more after we are dead,
and someone will know we bought it at the 15th street Target
and threw it from the train tracks we’d walked in Alberta City
jumping off and kissing about poetry when the Norfolk-Southern
thundered past, and the mechanical light pooling until it met
the stench of the tire factory. When I see great gulches of trash,
I think about the gluts of plastic in the ocean, and I think
of waste and laziness, but I forget about all that: how tossing
a bottle can be a pact. How it seemed like our bottles
we swallowed up by an unfathomable darkness
but were really just a few bottles in a thicket,
and there’s something to be said for the tenacity
of trash. What’s that expression? What we resist, persists?
I resist thinking anything how we were just two girls on a summer night
when a magnolia tree was too tall to climb. That was it,
wasn’t it? You can’t always choose if your trash
is history in the Petrified Forest or if it’s a few empties
in the middle of Tuscaloosa, and chances are
nothing special ever happened to those bottles.
No beach glass, no suncatcher, no nickel despoit,
no careful hand slipping them into a recycling bin,
no you or me come to collect them.
You can find me at http://www.erinlyndalmartin.com or on Twitter at @erinlyndal.
