Not far off the farm, we stumble a
truck rut track smack into frack-
ing, hardhats and klieg lights. No
fence or barbed wire, bare zone
of a work site, hilltop and dirt
bed, gravel and warnings—bag-
gage that towers the river. Lines
of porta-potties under a big god
-forsaken rigged-out and gaudy
crane-looking thing, it’s a beacon
for miles, without moratoriums
here, pumping 24/7. Factions and
splinter groups, senators, PACs,
each send out their peoples to snap-
shoot and leer, test or just protest
Marcellus shale. Leaning, one guy
takes his smoke break and gives us
the eye, but we see only shades;
he just tilts up a head, nods off
our direction, beyond fecund gulfs
where quick reeds swallow green
toads, shallow glades, steep grades
of a meadow, cricketing, croaking
for miles, no nondisclosure since
not undersigned. Under this shadow:
the unbroken horse you’ve fed baby’s
breath, core of an apple. Turning
for home, out of roaming, down
dusty lanes “not approved for gas
co. use,” by stables made over, trash
fire unwatched, a retrofit plowshare
landscaped as maybe some whale
fluke, mailboxes chunky as lard
cans, and yards sunk under lawn
junk, hole-fills, rotor-tilled gardens,
past pipelines, past privet, a sign
that proclaims “free manure”
William Cordeiro has previously worked as a NYC Teaching Fellow, a staff writer at the theater magazine offoffonline, and an assistant editor of Epoch. He has an MFA in poetry from Cornell, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying 18th century British literature. He is also the co-founder of Brooklyn Playwrights Collective and have had several plays produced in regional and off-off-Broadway venues, including a libretto performed at the Johnson Museum of Art. For two years he has been the Artist-in-Residence at Risley Residential College. He has also received residencies from the Provincetown Community Compact, Ora Lerman Trust, and Petrified Forest National Park.
His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Brooklyn Review, Harpur Palate, La Fovea, Baltimore Review, Leveler, Dirt, Waccamaw, Paradigm, Verse Wisconsin, Prick of the Spindle, Sentence, A cappella Zoo, Jacket, The Prose Poem Project, Carte Blanche, Poetry Quarterly, Spiral Orb, Barely South Review, decomP magazinE, L.E.S. Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Canary, And/Or, Third Wednesday, Crannóg, and Word for/Word.