SOLAR

by Justin William Evans

I guess you get to learn how not to speak, too
around those kind of men, suspicious and sweet.
Even as the air blackens, smoking cigarettes among the wire reels
you make your mouth more shut. The heat thins out the horizon.
The hours change.

But in the morning, you curl up at the bottom of your pepper-sand pit
and paint pipe angles you’ll hide where the roots used to splay.
All this land here used to be flowers of white lint. Now its long roads 
where you sleep in tobacco steam backseats.

Like you’re wombed in the heart of a compressor’s block
naked as the brain looking back at its feral hotel drunk.
An excavator bucks the foreman from his seat
when he nudges the wrong lever with his planetary gut.

Heavenly, that last week wasted in a storage container
waiting for tornados to undo our cheap labor.
The wind erodes our burrows, strike-pine uncovers
like bog people from the trench’s walls.
Chattering like rain when we light it. 

Justin William Evans is a poet, playwright, and teacher in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Keith, Blood Orange Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. His writing credits for the stage include A Tonguey Kiss for Samuel Davidson, Satan v. Laundry, and In Loving Memory: The Poet and Citizen Martha Whythblath. He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.