This Is Where They Plant The Cheap Pine

By Sandra Simonds
June 8, 2014

This is where they plant cheap pine.
These kinds of trees don’t communicate with each other.
This is not the ecology of the forest,
it’s the ecology of a tree farm.
They create and destroy themselves for us
with no tie to the future or the past.They used to make turpentine here.
A lot of workers tortured
in the convict leasing programs.
The company store was the only place to buy anything.
You worked all day in the swamp,
then you got yellow fever and died.

Rollover hedges all the way to the horizon.
I flipped through the pages of the Star Wars Journal
I bought my son. All the pages blank.
This is not a dystopia, it’s wreckage.

“Should I bleach my hair today and shave part of it off?” “I don’t think so.”
“Why not? I need a look as drastic as the world we live in.”
The Garden of Eden in sculpted information.
“My love, your hair is long, wild and beautiful.”