A Rural Truth as Ugly by Wayne Allen Sallee

Too quiet.
Then an electric snap
and a gentle blue: the end
of a stupid moth's
existence
in God's country.
Etchison's Dark Country.
Spider country.
Followed
by wind flaps
in farmer sheets
and panties gray
with hard water
from God's Country.
Etchison's... flapwup
a cross
between a sock stretched
taut in a funereal getup
or the chopper
blades reprimanding
that Morrow finish
the scene right.
Farmers expect that.
A funereal Get! Up!
Milk that goat at 7:00:00 am.
Guilt instilled
with every crap
turd dropping with flies.
The best and the brightest:
Farmers are. And after
the crops are tended
and the hay baled
and the straw is pitched
and the dishes are done
and before the sermons
they attend
to clubbing a deformed
calf and slip food
under sooty doors
keeping an embarrassment
of retardation from
the other good farmers
of spider country.
God's... it is not finished.
Soon babies born
one arm short
will be jammed in a butter
churn and churned and churned
until its flesh is slag,
but it sure did its part, by gum!
Butter for all,
to appease the bitch --
goddess of the plains.
The sky is a killing jar
set atop a big table
of squares of wheat
and corns and stuff.
Drink your Busch
beer quickly, my friend,
for this I know:
The Wabash Valley eats her dead.
The ground moves
with the fodder
of simple cattle
that has been there
since Lincoln freed
the slaves and beyond.
God Bless America.
God Bless Us All.
Farmers are strong
like bull.