David Chorlton

Country Highway

I’m tired, the woman shouts
into her cell phone, she’s my sister
for God’s sake and I’m tired
of goin’ to court and all you want
to fuckin’ do is . . . while she pumps
a few more miles into the tank
of her car that looks
as tired as she does, setting out

along the country western highway
where four datura flowers
are open on a strip
left as earth when the asphalt was laid down,
and a vulture floats
above the broom-yellowed hills
spreading east and west, as she follows

portable homes and a van
displaying the wish to
Secure Our Borders Now. She
isn’t stopping at any checkpoints,
just tunes the radio to the old songs
that match the high elevation landscape
where distractions are few
and the lyrics go like this:

Something he said
left me wanting him dead,
so I just had to cut him down.

                                 

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. He pursued his visual art and had several shows as well as writing and publishing his poetry in magazines and collections, the latest of which is The Devil’s Sonata from FutureCycle Press. Although he became ever more interested in the desert and its wildlife, the shadow side of Vienna emerges in his fiction and The Taste of Fog, which was published by Rain Mountain Press.