Audio: Read by the author. 

 

God like the leaf studs in tire tracks across the grass.
God like the dust veil raised
from a harvester
                                     chewing the stalks
until the field is lit with headlight beams. 

God the God of the cement silo, sunset-stained,
and the conveyor
                                         running through the night.
God like the sludge of a sinking stream
like a slinking coon
                                            growling away a passerby
beneath a guard-railed bridge.

God the road that goes from blacktop
into rutted and rumbled dirt. 

                              God the God the God
of a land that is a thousand miles of sameness
a thousand rows of unknowing
                                                              that is
a small town in a clump of trees
and the expanse that surrounds it. 

 

 

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Aaron Brown is the author of Acacia Road, winner of the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish). He has been published in World Literature Today, Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, and Transition, among others. He grew up in Chad and is an assistant professor of English at LeTourneau University.