Voltage Terrain

Twenty turtles sunning near a Tolsun pond,

some grave mistake by the concrete God,

poking their noses under the dry air

of the sickly-too-blue-water desert oasis

with a moat and a bridge,

reasons enough to daydream

in the electric wasteland,

the green-belted island,

as subliminal salamander men

dig deep beneath the Earth

& offer hovercraft to humans

who poke at them with blunt spears,

 then came the Huhugam river people,

building canals within canals,

holding water in red-clay pots,

embattled by summer monsoons, 

growing corn & squash & mesquite beans & cotton

 along the Laveen & Pecan Promenade,

the Gila gorgeous, shallow & broad,

with a tendency to rage when it rains,

a land now gone alienated, isolating minds

& the wind fails to turn pages for Tiowa,

Any witnesses worn by erosion, gone,

& the mandatory meetings

where we first meet Jesus

and all go out for a drink;

Oh yes, you're always rich

if the rest keep on winning,

sponsored & supported

by streaming stone scorpions,

Kachina-shouldered towers

lifting Palo Verde nuclear lightning

as the hawks fly in wonderment,

while all Tolsun roads south,

cut off by not-so-funky-Broadway,

a long stretch of farms & rancheros

& irrigated green fields stinking of manure,

as confused crows carry the drafts east,

hovering over a toxic dump long as a hippie jam

looking for the long lost gone-quite-secret lands

disappeared into box castles

 big and white as clouds, no people outside,

an amber-green prickly pear trampled by time,

all overlooked from Monument Mountain,

where the first meridian line was drawn

by pioneer surveyors at the confluence

of the Gila & Agua Fria Rivers,

farm implements clinging to the sand,

crunched into tiny plastic buttons,

crushed and fed right to people

with a gusto for high-fructose corn syrup,

slouching toward the suburbs, ever marching,

but the twenty turtles won't let you near them,

they instinctively feel your quantum GPS

approaching, perhaps a change in the light,

and then return to the faux-stone outcropping,

nearer to the road in the warmth of sun,

returning to their mummy depths, moonish white,

expecting to survive the next one-hundred-year flood

- Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Bookstore