Edie Meade
Truck Stops of America [American Sentences Poem]
If you want to feel more connected, track your Amazon packages.
Don’t look up how many long-haul truckers might be serial killers.
The map of the bodies is a map of Truck Stops of America.
All this, and a sky blue as the pool by the oil refinery.
Bury me in Dollar Tree compression socks and Wet-n-Wild blush.
Fibroids like you wouldn’t believe, clotting clues for polite company.
Picture a mobile crime scene: pick a girl up in Mobile; pack a lunch.
Let her down easy under the westernmost prong of the Lone Star state.
Trump flags fade bruise-purple, marrow-red, still menacing us with greatness.
Gun Pawn Payday Loans – The South Will Rise Again – He Is Risen – Bail Bonds.
Over the shooting range, “We do wedding receptions, birthday parties!”
We’re all as connected as we are alienated, clear as mud?
You just go about your life until the stench of rubber rubs you out.
Water stinks, Nextdoor says boil-warning’s been up three years, where you been?
Try Chillicothe, famous for burial mounds and missing women.
Paper milling the wet carpet roll hills; industrial broccoli.
My god, this country, the scorch of panhandle towns full of panhandlers.
Think you can handle it, living with the reek of pit toilet pig roasts?
Chicken shit presses you face-down on the gingham vinyl tablecloth.
Death’s a long haul, but tracking says our order’s out for delivery.
I’m ready to cross that bridge, Mississippi mud-vein bulge, at Memphis—
into the deep singing Arkansas wilds, where the bodies are hidden.
Edie Meade
Edie Meade is a writer, artist, and mother of four in Huntington, West Virginia. Recent work can be found in Atlas & Alice; Feral; Still: The Journal; New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Say hi on Twitter @ediemeade or https://ediemeade.com/.