Amber Waves

Kathryn Jones

October 30, 2020

I drive twenty miles to vote early out here in the boonies,  

past gardens planted with okra and tomatoes last summer,

now brown, and fields of invasive broomweed, gold as saffron, 

amber grass with feathery seed heads waving in the wind, 

red, white, and blue political signs flapping by the highway,

a mangled deer on the shoulder – so much roadkill this time of year.

I drive through a tiny town with stone storefronts, collapsed;

two churches, two liquor stores, but no polling place. 

I keep driving to the next town, the county seat, look for the 

“VOTE HERE” banner waving in front of the old courthouse,

show the election clerk my ID even though I’m wearing a mask, 

mark my ballot, feed it into the machine, watch the count increase by one.

I drive back home, noticing the house that burned down last week, 

the homeless man standing by the road, staring at the cars going by, 

the mountain cedar clogging pastures where cattle gnaw the ground, 

the sky hazy with dust, blown all the way to Texas from the Sahara, 

the football field where the six-man team used to play on Friday nights,

and the beer cans littering the bar ditch where the amber grass still waves. 

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.