Sweet-Gas

Abstract

Sweet-Gas Carolyn Orosz (bio) Sweet-Gas We have been sleeping in the Cottonwood Creek oil fields,or half-sleeping, eating cross-legged around a pit of off-brand mountain dew remains, all the stars falling out of the sky like sawdust,like confetti, like all fears are fragmentsin the end. And this is the end. Here now, isn't it? The ground in the desert braided exactly like that erosion boardmy brother made for the sixth-grade science fair. Driving through the moonscape—limestone barnacles at the roadside, hay fires visible at the horizon, huge culverts in the drainages & the drainages dry.The purple stain of juniper, all the cheatgrass cured. At 8 am the light smolders so all around half the land is hidden.Everything is either invisible or illuminated— the oil derricks calling out to us with their signal fires,all of the horses tossing their heads, sunning their glowing necks. Herons, great/grey-blue grazing alongside the cattle.Each of us, naked, goes on unaware of our own nakedness. There's nothing here.There's nothing anywhere, that's the thing. [End Page 97] Carolyn Orosz Carolyn Orosz lives and writes in Northern California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, New South, Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is a poetry reader for the Adroit Journal. Copyright © 2020 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents