The county road winds through low hills past moldy trailers and shotgun shacks ablaze with forsythia. The papermill’s blinking smokestacks rise up out of the valley beyond the last hill, the gaping mouth of the dawning sky swallowing their thick sulpherous plumes. We’ll spend the next twelve hours scrambling in grease, inspecting and measuring, analyzing, recommending, fixing, while outside the chain link gates, the houses of the town cling like barnacles to a beached and dying whale. Weapons of mass destruction? We deployed them long ago.
I watch my life
limp on ahead of me in a kind of dance
through the Alabama hills
fiddling an old tune
with broken strings.
.
.by Gary LeBel
Cumming, Georgia
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