Yellow Archipelago
- Yellow Archipelago
Nebraskan towns float on waves of corn, Stone harbors strewn with dust instead Of sand. Women are stranded downtown, on islands
Along the interstate, where sanity is An addiction. Everyone is normal here. The diesel and the locust rule the land.
Lights pass like Morse code as freighters Steam through the night; we evolve from the remnants Of others, the dream catchers and Mardi Gras
Beads left behind. These women are not Code breakers, never staying awake Until the Merlot dawn. The night contains
No secrets, the men at the bar endlessly Speaking into their ears like auctioneers. Small talk keeps them awake through
The four o’clock hour: the hum the earth makes, The only sound beneath the full moon. Sex has become a mottled religion. The blue
Molecules of night soak the lawns As if they’d fallen from the pages of a girl’s Chemistry book. Someday, boys will shoot [End Page 952]
Marbles through circles in the dirt. There’s a hole in the middle of the heartland Where crows sometimes disappear from the tops
Of cornstalks. They resist the pull of gravity Again, arcing like bloated freighters over The spurned waves of the archipelago.
Anthony Butts has poems forthcoming in Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (William Morrow & Co.) and in Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Poets Read Their Work (Rhino Records). He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Dayton.
