Get Off at the Next Exit, and: A Black Woman on a Yellow Treadmill in an Open Field

Abstract

Get Off at the Next Exit, and: A Black Woman on a Yellow Treadmill in an Open Field Janice N. Harrington (bio) Get Off at the Next Exit 1. Long pleated rows, dredged, tiled, plow-broken. They scraped the tallgrasses away a long time ago. 2. The wood of Osage oranges burns too hot, too quick. 3. John Deere. Monsanto. Bullet-riddled and rusted. CR1600. Take a right on "Cry Baby Road." Near the bridge. 4. A coal train moaning in the distance. The distance. 5. A midwestern town: Main street. Church steeples in every direction. Pickup trucks. Yellow gravy on white biscuits. Black coffee in a mug. Hostas. We take our flags seriously, here. 6. Near the heron rookery, nesting cranes lift their beaks in warning. We are always warned. 7. Chapel veils, lace worn for piety. Little brown me in '63 with a Kleenex atop my head. Have you ever seen it, strands of spiderwebs strung in long slings over a prairie, sun-licked dew on gossamer? 8. Moths have the most evolved hearing of any insect. In my own ears, screech, whistle, pulses of spewing steam, scraped steel. 9. But I want John Cage playing 4'33". 10. 11. 12. 13. Inside this skin: Black, gendered, scarred, drying, loosening, soft. 14. Noise. [End Page 119] 15. I have heard her, her voice. How do we laugh again, or afterward reach such clear notes? 16. At West Side Park, a bronze Indian lifts his arms in a "Prayer for Rain." Johnson's bequest to benefit the city, especially its laborers. 17. I agree with Cage. I don't need sounds to talk to me. You are always enough. 18. The slag piles? Yes, I have seen them. 19. 20. 21. 22. They say it's in our groundwater too. 23. I will carve a heart for you from an Osage orange. A trash tree, but it burns hot, quick. [End Page 120] A Black Woman on a Yellow Treadmill in an Open Field after Katherine Simóne Reynolds She walks, then runs. A Black woman on a yellow treadmill in an abandoned field. How to keep up? A Black body running, exhausted in a field. Runagate. Runagate. This is the "grueling labor of constantly performing your identity," Reynolds writes. In the middle of a field of withered grass and broken stalks sits a yellow treadmill. The earth too turns on its track of spacetime, on the treadmill of another season, another solstice: sun and sere. See her? A Black woman running, not getting anywhere. She calls it: "You're the Only Reason I'm Staying Here." Don't stop. Don't stop. This is the grueling labor: wo manwo manwo blackwo man and black and black and black. Imagine a field and a yellow treadmill and a Black woman. The field is a space. The treadmill is a space and a field. A Black woman's body is a field and a space. The beat of a Black woman's footsteps on a yellow treadmill is not the beat of her heart. A Black woman's body is not a treadmill, but there are those who have made the mistake. She runs fast, faster, perfects her performance: a Black woman moving through space, ahead, or toward something that seems like more. [End Page 121] Janice N. Harrington Janice N. Harrington's latest book of poetry is Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (BOA Editions). She teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press