Nate Maxson
Fault Lines
The first time we spent the night together
You put on a mixtape (a genuine cassette tape) of pop music from the 1980s
And I thought about the process of breaking prairie into pasture
They nuke it with tractors and machinery from green to yellow and let the livestock out
Neither of us were that young but those drought-shot fields floated through me with your breath providing the wind and the birds
Still, years later
We prefer, like sequestered oracles
Waiting out the dustbowl
If we have to speak (your finger on my lip when I opened my mouth to attempt an explanation)
To speak with the dead when we can
Bio
Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.