CONNOR YECK
The Windfarm We were sweeping the garage for tacks, odd scraps of shingling when she told me she’d still go to the zoning meetings if it didn’t cost a slashed tire every // fuckin // time. That garage was a barn, I think. Milorganite. Deer-corn. The slithering braille of birdshot beneath our steps. This, the truth of it, she said, & what beside it, & in the delta of a vacant palm offered me that ravaged past, half-life of car wrecks & Labor Days & godchildren gone in church-hall games of tag. Forty year neighbors, some of them. Now, the macheted politesse of severance. Now, the bitter hitching of porch clasps on a caravan of workers clearing land, distant truck-treads the mucked utterance of sellout. She does not ask me on whose side I’ve been standing, & I would not know. It has felt like a shittily-cut documentary since the fights began. Front-yard // backyard fictions. Wooden road signs stolen & burned & bought & burned again & what I think I am trying to say is : when the turbines went up, half the county suddenly cared for birds. 102 | PHOEBE 48.1