Tipton Poetry Journal

Not Far Away Thomas O’Dore approaching on foot thru corn forest or soybean carpet sometimes a thin riparian berm of sycamores or cotton woods …you smell it first… a big inland river emerging where viscous water laps the heavy redolent muck \ decades of chemical silt fertilizers / herbicides / pesticides sieved thru deforested floodplains \ sliding on a centuries old bed of untreated human sewage and god-knows-what trash from municipal dumping sites and toxic industrial wastes this one is no different from so many others except for the irony of its Miami name …Waapaashsiiki corrupted by French traders …Quabache slurred by English settlers …Wabash – it shines white by discharge the twelfth largest river in the forty-eight contiguous states \ four hundred and seventy-five miles long four hundred and eleven free-flowing \ longest unimpeded stretch east of the Mississippi \ alternately by season a brown or green turbid sluice of excrement puking…into the Ohio Guys like Tom O’Dore do not have biographies.

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