Shelby County 

We start at the center, solid, unchanged.
Ancient trees and houses
that have borne witness for decades,
stoically watching our lives unfurl.

Let me show you Brown Avenue,
the tidy backyard where I sunbathed,
frying my pale young skin.
Rumble of the freight train at the end of the block,
gurgle of my father’s garden fountain.

Let me show you what’s changed:
the Winn-Dixie turned to a Planet Fitness.
Let me tell you how I stood in my pink smock in the checkout lane,
ringing up old men who still smoked in the grocery store
and young immigrant mothers, carts filled with vegetables.
I spoke to them in my broken high school Spanish,
my mouth tasting these new shapes,
rang up their bunches of cilantro,
a new scent on my adolescent fingers.

Let me take you further.
Let me show you my boyfriend’s
tan, calloused hands, white Ford pick-up,
the way the country air rushed so fast through the open windows
that it was hard to breathe.
Nights on Vigo Road, tapestry of stars,
tiny mosquitos pinpricks erupting into angry welts on my skin.

Here we see the wheel of time turning,
children have become parents,
there is more of everything. Three McDonald’s.
Each end of Main Street clustered with
strip malls, fast food, dollar stores.
Acres of corn plowed under,
soulless subdivisions sprouting in their place.

But still, a dark countryside.
Still, crops growing, roads twisting,
tight curves where these memories are stored.