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4 Wheat Harvest I have a girl who will lie with me to watch purple flaring thunderheads, a Chevy to hotrod on Sundays off, all the overtime I can stand at the farmers’ co-op tire shop. Daylight sinks each evening into fields beyond the edge of town. Wheat trucks line up at the scales, dust swirling in the running lights. The darkness quiets July’s dry wind, and carries the smell of grain in from the plains. Air from the impact gun blows hot, busting truck tires hot from the road on these blazing days at the shop. Trucks come in with retreads flapping, sidewalls blown, shredded tubes. I patch and bang and pry all day on the semi radials, the split-rings, the rusty widowmaker wheels. They’re always rushing to get back, roaring toward the field, the next load, empty trailers banging through the ruts they’ve gouged in Main Street’s tar. Before long those harvest crews will haul their combines through the dark, threshing a path to Canada. They will stop where daybreak spreads 5 across a bristling ripe horizon, heads of grain as far as anyone can see nodding in the sideways light. They will leave behind stubble, tire carcasses, chaff in the streets, my nagging dreams about the way they move. ...

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