84 Come Winter

Jaxon McCanlies

There’s a single strip of highway between Southland and Post, the precipice of the caprock quietly singing to itself, and when winter rolls around and the wilting grasses die off, mesquite trees mystifying in blue and orange and gray skies, notice how the grasshoppers dance across frostbitten asphalt, lifted high above the flats by a choir of distant wind turbines playing something purposeful, maybe not to you, but to someone, that stranger standing attentive in the night, humming softly, beautiful, yet out of tune, as mourning doves cry and fight and fly, all to never be accounted by pen or ink to go down in history as some back porch-summer evening story; the specs of prairie grasses now shaking hands, they wave to passersby; do not hesitate, friend, to stop and wave back, company is short lived here.