Mary B. Moore
Texaco
The tanker truck bearing
Texaco’s red star on its barrel
turns the corner gingerly,
its driver peering
in the side-view mirror.
A Mustang sidles
up to drink, but the tanker
keeps angling away. The red
Dodge pickup idling beside it
doesn’t even try.
The two men who get out at the truck stop,
both wearing white tees and jeans, stretch
their arms and walk into the Sheetz.
They’re cut out crisply from sky:
the dry Central Valley air
sharpens every boundary.
The only blur wavers upwards
from the asphalt, the heat’s
visible purr.
Though the tank looks like a sideways silo,
its freight is combustion
not wheat. Does the red star betoken
explosion, or Texas?
The truck gradually reverses
and turns. It has a lumbering grace
like the large, slow man
from the wheat-gold
Malibu. He tours the narrow
aisles of the convenience store,
stooping and reaching,
back-stepping, a dance of looking
for cupcakes. His large straw hat brim
hasn’t blocked the burn. He’s red
with sun.
It’s all so opaque, so solid,
though the heat wavers up
from the truck’s lit barrel
like a spirit, an aura, while
the snout of the gas station’s
tank rifles the truck’s side.
Mary B. Moore is the author of Flicker (Broadkill River Press, 2016), winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Award; the chapbook Eating the Light (Sable Books, 2016 ); and the poetry collection The Book of Snow (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1998). New poems appear in the Georgia Review, Poem/Memoir/Story, Nimrod, Cider Press Review, Coal Hill Review, Drunken Boat, Birmingham Poetry Review, and more.
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