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Attrition
- University of Arkansas Press
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Attrition Stranded along the interstate and hoping the red blinking might be a far-off sheriff’s cruiser and not the sleepy Morse of hazard bulbs on empty grain silos, their spent concrete stave shadows braced hard against the tired lean of wrack-framed barns, I sift the radio’s slow fade: ’s AM starlet belting something like, “It’s no use,” the signal sputtering further into white noise with each tractor-trailer grinding by. Across acres of flat, the Kansas dusk drops its dusty partition of crop chemicals, exhaust from pickups headed home, and I stare out the grimed windshield watching a black scrim of starlings scatter, re-collect over the highway’s ditch. Again and again they lift up, a fist in the dry wind, and return broken to the prairie’s dull ache. When darkness falls, they’ll fly off for the horizon, the edge of a distant field, settle there among the dirt, the chaff. ...