Pain is a tractor

bold in bright green with yellow accents,  industrial orange.   To 
afford  it,  you   mortgage   your land,  yourself.   It rolls over your 
rich    grasslands,   harrowing    your   fields.    The   wild   of   you, 
marsh   bunnies,  garter   snakes,  try   to  skitter   away,  end  up 
bloody  and  macerated,  mowed.   Mulch,  microbes,  the dirt of 
you tossed, turned to be replanted.  Remade at new angles and 
grades.   Picture the endless sweep of the Palouse, you desolate 
as a monoculture.

dark topsoil turned, all
furrows fold to a distant,
dead horizon line

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Christa Fairbrother, MA, is currently poet laureate of Gulfport, Florida but she spent ten years living on Whidbey Island. Her poetry has appeared in Arc Poetry, Pleiades, and Salamander. She’s been a finalist for The Pangea Prize, The Prose Poem Competition, The Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She’s had residencies with the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Bethany Arts Community, and her chapbook, Chronically Walking, was a finalist for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. Water Yoga (Singing Dragon, 2022), her nonfiction book, won medals from the Nautilus Book Awards and the Florida Writers Association.