The Great Dust Bowl
[title type="subtitle-h6"]Megan Kruse[/title][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]The day that I returnedto the speck of land that held my poor childhood in its green hands,I found that the earth had sucked up the old bloody-painted barnthrough a straw.Those sometimes-smiling windows were gone;the floorboards that groaned loudest when silence was neededthe door that didn’t quite close,and Mother, too,with her apron and her pale rosy fingers—all gone.[spacer height="30"]I turned to the old sycamore, standing so still.What do you know of disappearances? I saidwith my feet rooted and rooting deeper as we spoke.What do you know of the bloody barn where Father knifed cow-throats?What do you know of Mother and her apron?But that old bastard didn’t say a word.Always, his only fruit, the fruit of bitterness.I sunk to my already scuffed knees,ran my fingers over hard, unforgiving earth,redder now, I think, than before.If I’d had a shovel,I’d have dug until I found it there beneath the world—the windows, the floorboards, and that door still open,until I pulled Mother by pale fingersup and out,with red dirt still in her hair and spitting from her mouth,and I’d forgive that sycamore for not saving them,for standing passive like he always had,even when I was bruised and still getting bruised.[spacer height="30"]But I had no shovel;I never did.I could not unbury the past.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]