The Poet Visits Dearfield Because It Is Important They Remember That Drought Happens Every Twenty Years on the Plains

after Cortney Lamar Charleston

and there is nothing special about a ghost town
parched and cut down at the knees. To be special

or singular is to break cycles: first Black so-and-
so. A thawing of viral microbes from the permafrost.

First Black female such-and-such. Polar bears
with communal alopecia. Nicodemus, the last

Black homestead standing: a spur-swole man, time-weak
and trembling but still holding his gun straight

over a bullet-tacked spiral of bodies. This is a genre.
Horse Opera. Western. Tragedy. Tragedy. A set

of roles, rules, expectations from an expectant
audience. A ghost town. A Black town. A highway

sign. A third-act disaster. A Black town thronged
with a Black people pummeled routinely by:

fill in the blank: [baton and force dog, bimonthly
cross burnings, recreational flooding,
standoffs, shootings, badged boys, drought]

A Black town. A rattlesnake’s judder on Rattlesnake
Hill. A hope off Highway 34 that sneaks

itself from sagebrush to boot to soul. Hope as genre
convention. Hope as flashback, memory necessary

for climax. I am not the first Black poet to see hope
in the dried pits of what we once built. I play to type.

I am not a cycle spearer. Not immune to hope, writhing
armored in aortic arch, when reminded that drought

is inevitable on the plains. Not immune to believing
next time we’ll learn from their dryland ambitions

and build something stronger.