Small-town America was abruptly abandoned about forty years ago. Angry tribes of white-complected people are prepared for battle with proverbial pitchforks.
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| Cresting stationary wave in the Otter Tail River below Fergus Falls Dam |
The embittered people who remain in largely insular, hardscrabble towns range from dysfunctionally depressed to putting on a happy face for tourists who visit their town to escape the stress of some modicum of economic viability in pockets of urban America.
Stationary Waves is a poem that includes a cresting stationary wave found in a river that surges through a small town in western Minnesota like a pulsing blood vessel, overlain by my knee-jerk impressions of a town in decline.
Stationary Waves
Fergus Falls, 28 August 2016
Naked bedrock
punctuates history
like a stationary wave
reveals a shameful deceit
Black flies circumnavigate
the Fergus Falls imbecile
like delinquent exoplanets
orbit a fading red dwarf
Colonies of pickup trucks
permanently stuck in reverse
back into empty spaces
in overflow parking
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