1

Summer, 90 miles from the Walmart
The preboyescent A-girls are back
From Ranchowhachamacallit
(fruitnutland) girling the small-craft
Armada, catfighting when in
Close quarters, pirates battling to spend nights
With Nana-papa to watch (argh!)
Lord of the Rings, Episode whichevah.

2

Ninety miles from the fat-ass Walmart
So-called SupR store, we abide
Lucretian rules, live for today
All atoms being equal doctrinally
In their immortality.
Sandhills at the creekmouth squawk
Like mechanized oogah horns
Jarring loos teeth fillings, while eagles
Fly hithith in morning fishing tasks.

3

90 miles from the Walmart
Double-trailer logging rigs come
Down the county road from the Blind Sucker,
The road washboarded like Inner Mongolia
Or the SomalianOutback.
I looked at snowmobile clubs’ mags
Found a red arrow and sign: Ice Bridge to Cannada
No spelling test for licenses needed mayhaps?

4

Came a night our pal Bill fled
Demons (in his cups), plowed an
Alyouminnie-um craft into
Rocky shoals, not once, but twice,
Which now, by local custom means
His name attaches to said landmass,
Until the next aqauatic boner
Captures the temporary prize.

5

Ninety miles from Walmart
One learns to avoid the lodge’s
Laundry on all rainydays, you see
It spawns sudden catfights in the heat
And sweaty close quarters, brings out
Competitive, venomous streaks
Among some summer choring folk
Leaving risible scars in egos.

6

Ninety miles from the Walmart
Fishers don’t fish, I refer to
Etymological oddities
Not churcy lore of St. Jamesians’
Provenence, we have a good friend
Who badmouths life in big shitties
And interstate trailgaters,
Life here seeking silence from all creatures.

7

Ninety miles from the Walmart
There are more drunks on rivers
And lakes than on the gravel roads;
Dining out here meands a night
At the Stump, where they grind meat
Themselves, and shape it like god,
One might say away from earshoit
Of churchological ubers and megas.

8

Last night we burned verdant sweet corn husks
To keep busking bears and coons away,
Today picked a gallon of blobs, and
A quart of succulent red razzies
While the dog patrolled our perimeter.
We grazed on teaberries, not one
Of the maker’s top five products.
We burn time here, unlike below
Where the reverse seems to obtain.

9

This place where we all wear headnets
Not mesh to keep out bugs, but clear,
Invisiblejobs to keep out those
Not here, the othes, bogeymen,
Pols and tourists, those not OF here,
Those with ideas of changes
Against which our nests area cones
Of privacy and other fictions.

10

Sixty miles from Walmart, on the Gem
Of the Huron, we amble across
Stepped ledges bearing fossil piles
Of zoic ages long gone
Life preserved in limestone plates,
Which argues for crematorial
Options to lyse mysteries
Eons beforfe the Walmartozoic Age.

11

Ninety miles from Walmart, standing
On a beach redolent of fish,
Rubbernecking the space station
Boogeying northwest to southeast
Most lickety-split in the high blue yonder
Up where dead dreams float past us,
We have no money or means left
To put men up there looking outward.

12

Winds here insist as in del Fuego
Howl like hungry banshees hiding
In the forests like psychotic highwaymen,
Stealing dreams of cityfoolk walking
Armed with hog legs in holsters
Convinced they can take down the monsters
(that live solely in their shaky minds)
Here resides peace lacking Walmart trappings.

13

We gather ripe bloos and razzies
From the point greenswards, freeze them flat for winter,
Bone-icing lessons in humility.
Astronauts walk overhaead, ascended
On money while we mere humans hunker
Shivering, oils bills too high
For anyone but tax collectors,
Anyone providing floodgates for spenders.

14

90 miles from Walmart, same
As a million miles from Congress
We pass our days in pure silence,
Hear only wind, wave, birds and wolves,
Sparing us false songs of political
Fools, lustily beating their suited chests,
Howing like predators intent
On crushing alien species, say us?

15

Some ninety miles from Walmart, we
Live not in end-times or past-times
But the flintiest of now-times, hoping
To eke out life, never-mind the happies,
We dare look down no paths save our own,
Stepping over pitfalls and mines,
Some made by god in our genes,
The rest blindly laid by mankind.

16

I doubt that God has ever felt
The sweetness of ripe blackberries
Rendered slowly into viscous jam
That sits on toast, gleaming with allure.
Simple pleasures surround, engulf us
Out here in the sugar sand and cedar
Swamps, where tamarack faerie rings
Sprout, grow old, and pass on unseen,
Ninety miles from the Walmart.

17

Early October the land ninety miles
From the Walmart, fewewr hownds sing swampward
Chasing bears, our geese gone a month ago.
Leaves recklessly changing color overnight,
The deer gone gray from red as fast, sandhills fled south.
No hard freeze yet, but our peppers tremble
At the prospect, a sure bet hereabouts,
The Gray Lady is howling ten-foots swells at us.

18

Locals road-hunt pats, slow-rolling as did
All before them in their automobiles,
Mostly shooting from windows of the forts
On wheels; pats by morning, timber-doodles
By even when it darkens enough to see
Your muzzleflash and recover the take.
Summerines are closing up, running
South to stillborn, manufactured lives.

19

Here wood is being made, split, stacked up
All eyes on skies, barometers, critters’
Behaviors, harbingers of stay-for-months snow,
Howling nor’easters dumping twenty-foot drifts
Overnight, forcing plows, snow shovels, snowmobiles into action,
FEMA here called neighbors.
Ninety miles from the Walmart people stand
Together without edicts from afar.

20

Here collective is a verb of survival
Not a political noun espoused by ismites.
Neighbors share with prompts or churhercion,
Hard times on this land never out of mind,
A wonter hoves we tug down chooks
Not for style, but warmth, dictates of MTV
Quashed by reality 90 miles
From artificial life in the Walmart.