This from a social call twenty four years ago. We gave their baby a bracelet with a big Allah engraved next to his name. Her laughter, and the past a spool of tales unwinding. Now I must leave. In the cabin my thoughts stutter no further than the window, never penetrating the glass.
Buffalo carcasses floating on channels and channels suffocating with water hyacinths.
Pot bellied grain boats stranded and a boy sleeping on deck, flies swarm his thin face. She lived beside the train tracks. She lived and played and waited for the caboose to shake her home. And the musty smell of the cow stall and the mule, a depository of rage and affection, a whole family of angry kicks, and the boy called to piss on its wound. They waited for the train, for the day to slip like a shovel in the metallic taste of dirt.